Kirk said > 1) The fully z instruction set should be fully documented in the POP, > and OEM vendors or emulators should be free to implement it.
Most of the instructions are documented in PoPs, but some very significant ones are NOT. Obvious missing examples include DIAGNOSE and SIE, but there are several others and there's also a larger set of I/O related functionality that goes well beyond just the instruction set architecture. These were previously made available under license to 3rd parties and even then, the licensed materials were not and are not complete descriptions and in some cases not even accurate! Availability of those materials has been tightened significantly in recent years and in some cases they have license charges attached. If you had the information already you might get a break on the updates, but getting your hands on them from scratch is like pulling teeth (I know from first hand experience) As an editorial comment, I and a couple of other ISV folks proposed the idea to IBM that they should provide a software interface for vendor use and that -IF- we had such an interface we would no longer require access to the licensed materials and IBM could withdraw them. After an initial blush of interest that idea also appears to have disappeared into the IBM black hole because it would have required (a little) development effort which was not in anyone's plans. "Oh well". > IBM should provide a "reference implementation" in the form of contributing > to the open source Hercules project. Yeah that'll happen in our lifetimes... :-( ---------------------------------------------------------------------- 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
