John Ehrman knows much more about what kinds of older mainframes are still in use than I do, and I imagine that he had good reason to use the qualifying language ". . . so if your processor supports useful immediate operands, take advantage".
Still, the extended-immediate facility dates back ten years now, to June 2003; and I have found the 'new' instructions it makes available very helpful. The FLOGR instruction alone has, for example, revolutionized the way in which I do bit-map processing. I would urge any HLASM programmer who is not already using these instruction to familiarize himself with them, for reasons of convenience and code compactness as well as the performance reasons John mentions. Let me also take this opportunity to add my personal view that base-register-displacement schemes are at best obsolescent in new code. There is no excuse for using them ab initio. Equally, of course, there is no compelling case for their doctrinaire elimination from old code. John Gilmore, Ashland, MA 01721 - USA ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
