john gilmore wrote:
Chris Craddock writes:
This is of course, a religious argument to many. I don't expect to
change any minds. But I offer the following challenge to assembly
language application developers. Even though LE is a demented rats-nest
of bad ideas, if you simply use it, you might be pleasantly surprised at
how much easier and faster your code can run overall. There's a lot more
function available and it is trivially easy to use.
Yes indeed! My first exposure to the LE came when I had to write some
things to be used by COBOL programmers, and I found that I could use the
LE-supplied prologue and epilogue (stack-management) macros to preserve
the COBOL environment without adding measurably to the burden these
COBOL applications were already carrying. I was then agreeably
surprised to learn that this was the case for heap storage too.
For a few years, we were teaching our course "Using LE Services
in z/OS" (and its OS/390 predecessor equivalent) frequently.
This is a multi-lingual course (COBOL, PL/I, C, and Assembler)
and we discuss how to use all the callable services in the
language(s) of interest to the students. In the discussion of
LE-enabled Assembler, we also demonstrate how to use the LE
macros to generate reentrant code.
But we haven't been asked to teach that course in over
six years. [Even so, I keep it current, just having finished
the z/OS 1.8 version which, by the way, added some significant
new callable services.]
Some of us who write a lot of assembly-language routines for other
people to use have also developed our own stack- and heap-management
macros and code. This is a viable alternative to use of the LE routines
in situations in which the environment is not perforce an LE (because
SLPL) one. Its limited use reflects the fact that the HLASM macro
language is radically underused and under appreciated. (People of
course code macro instructions, but they don't often write their own
macro definitions.) But that is a topic for another thread in another
place . . .
Indeed. Mainframers just don't seem to have as much
fun as we used too.
Kind regards,
-Steve Comstock
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