Whoa! Bad analogy. EBCDIC and Octal are not parallel. EBCDIC/ASCII. Octal/Hex.
Why does everyone on IBM-MAIN turn into a first-year law student? I know there is no such thing as an octal machine. I was writing familiarly. I take it back. Make the sentence read "I have never worked with a machine whose documentation and users conventionally described the contents of its memory and associated files using octal notation." There. Is that better? I think one might familiarly refer to the Z as a "hex machine." No, except for certain floating point, the machine is not hex. But it uses 8-bit bytes that are most conveniently -- and typically -- described in hex. Charles -----Original Message----- From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Paul Gilmartin Sent: Wednesday, November 05, 2014 7:22 AM To: [email protected] Subject: Octal (was: System vs. user ABEND codes) On Tue, 4 Nov 2014 16:09:22 -0800, Charles Mills wrote: > >I have never worked on an octal machine but octal makes sense on a machine >with 6-bit characters and words a multiple of 6 bits, right? > It's not an "octal machine" any more than the z is an "EBCDIC machine". It's all in the software and documents. >My favorite octal "story" is that on UNIX to dump a file in hex you use the >octal dump program (od with the -x option). > They couldn't use "du" to abbreviate "dump" because that was already used. It's kinda like MVS console commands. It gets worse. The PDP-11 was a 16-bit machine with 8-bit characters. But because prevailing custom, all the documentation used octal. And little-endian: 515 $ echo abcd | od -x 0000000 6261 6463 000a 0000005 Ugh! Better: 516 $ echo abcd | od -tx1 0000000 61 62 63 64 0a 0000005 -- gil ---------------------------------------------------------------------- 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
