Chris Mason wrote:
Shmuel,
Long ago, shortly after I had learned Assembler, I was very keen on the
possibilities of assembler language and its associated macro language. (I
got a nodding acquaintance with FORTRAN and COBOL a little later but saw no
reason to let this dampen my enthusiasm.) I fancied I saw the possibilities
of building high level functions in assembler macro language. It's a shame
that its power has tended to be restricted to system generation-like tasks -
I should know as a perforce NCP specialist from the birth of NCP/EP.
Still as something of a novice, I surprised some grayer beards on a project
by creating a generation macro for the software which included a sort in
assembler macro language. This was more an intellectual exercise than being
really necessary since the instructions could have been "you must list the
addresses in ascending numerical order" with a check that aborted the
generation if this instruction was not followed.
...
Chris Mason
There are all sorts of bizarre things one can do with assembly language.
I have one subroutine (used in a JES2 separator exit), still in use
after over a decade, that needed to do table lookup in a static table of
several hundred entries. Just to prove it could be done, the program
uses assembly-time macros and assembler arrays to replicate a run-time
hashing function and to construct and save the table data in a static
hash table which is used by hash table lookup at run time. Run-time
table lookup averages 1-2 probes versus 7 or so for a binary search of a
sorted table and all the cost of building the table occurs at assembly
time - probably overkill in efficiency for the original application in
question, but definitely aesthetically pleasing.
...
--
Joel C. Ewing, Fort Smith, AR [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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