Ok John, I will bite what's a BIF ? Scott ford www.identityforge.com
Tell me and I'll forget; show me and I may remember; involve me and I'll understand. - Chinese Proverb On Oct 6, 2012, at 8:49 AM, John Gilmore <[email protected]> wrote: > Randy Hudson wrote: > > <begin extract> > I don't believe MVCIN was available on the 360/50; we used the TR > instruction to reverse fields, or otherwise re-arrange them. > <end extract> > > and he at once quite correct and utterly wrong. As usual, it depends > upon what "was available" is thought to mean. > > There is and has "always" been a list of non-standard mainframe > instructions that IBM can make available for a [small] fee. Some > shops use one or more of them, and others are unaware of them. > > MVCIN is an instruction that shops that do text processing in a > semitic language (or in Farsi, which, while Indo-european, is also > written from right to left in an almost but not quite standard version > of the Arabic alphabet) had an early felt need for. IBM met that > need, and MVCIN was available early in the Middle East, certainly by > 1971 when I first encountered it there. > > It was, for example, installed on the mainframes of the National > Iranian Oil Company (Naft Melli) in Tehran and Abadan in the early > 1970s; and I remember writing and installing a BIF that made it > available in PL/I there. > > John Gilmore, Ashland, MA 01721 - USA > > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- > For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, > send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
