On 08/01/2010 06:50 AM, Shmuel Metz (Seymour J.) wrote: > In <027f01cb283c$5a3431f0$0e9c95...@net>, on 07/20/2010 > at 01:49 PM, "William H. Blair" <[email protected]> said: > >> 7. Already long-established, bad Assembler language coding >> Habits. Assembler F was light years ahead of anything >> else available at the time. > > IBMAP. Even HLA doesn't have everything that it had. > > 9. IBM and IBM contractors had to find huge numbers of programmers > for OS/360. Many of them were extremely inexperienced, and they > set bad cultural norms that their successors followed.
I dealt with assemblers on other platforms in those early days and didn't have to deal with Assembler on the S/360 platform until it had over a decade to mature, but my impression from the remarks (and code) of one of my predecessors is that over-liberal usage of Assembler symbols in the early days gave you problems on machines with small physical memory or greatly increased the assembly time. Either of these could be a good and just motivation for using coding practices that now seem inappropriate in our unconstrained environments. These may have been lessons learned on even more constrained platforms (like IBM 1401) and carried over to S/360 inappropriately, but I suspect they also applied to the early 360's. > >> Note 1: I remember POK IBMers showing up at GUIDE and SHARE asking >> us to look at the source for some element involved in processing the >> START command. Nobody in POK could determine what, exactly, it did >> -- but they were afraid to touch it or take it out. > > IEFZGST1 and IEFZGST2 anyone? They were Allocation rather than STC, > but I'll match them against any other horror show that anyone cares to > nominate. > -- Joel C. Ewing, Fort Smith, AR [email protected] ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html
