On Fri, 23 Jun 2006 11:13:00 +0200, Phil Payne <[EMAIL PROTECTED] RESEARCH.FREESERVE.CO.UK> wrote:
Snip! > >That led to other weirdness. My COBOL is now rusty, but IIRC there are two ways of handling >an array or table - indexes and subscripts? One was computed when set, the other when used, >and ANSI COBOL used halfwords. I think it was indexes that were computed when used. Anyway, >you could write a simple COBOL programme for the S6 that would outperform a (same MIPS, >nominally) /168 by a factor of three. I'm pretty sure it's the other way around. I vaguely remember being a COBOL programmer when indexes became available. Subscripts were ordinary numbers -- n would refer to the nth element in the array, and the same subscript could be used for different arrays. An index, as you say, was alwys a binary integer. Set it to one and the it's value would be zero. Set it to one and it's value would be the length of an entry in the array. IIRC it was loaded into a register and used as an index register. > >I've never trusted MIPS or benchmarks since. > Interesting story. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- 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
