On 7/20/2010 11:01 AM, Edward Jaffe wrote:
I've seen other "old" programs with many hard-coded offsets and
lengths and always wondered why this was such common practice
back then.
Was it because there were a lot of inexperienced assembler
programmers writing code? Was it because people thought the
platform would not last and treated every program as a "throw
away"? Was it due to limitations in the assembler itself?
In addition to all the other reasons, I'd suggest two more. One
was the belief that IBM wouldn't change the offsets, the other
that in the days of mountable DASD, SYS1.(A)MODGEN just wasn't
accessible most of the time. We also ordered IBM optional
source, and extracted the macros (SYS1.PVTMACS), and those also
wasn't resident until the seventies.
Gerhard Postpischil
Bradford, VT
----------------------------------------------------------------------
For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions,
send email to lists...@bama.ua.edu with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO
Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html
