On Mon, 7 May 2018 08:42:00 -0500, Joel C. Ewing <[email protected]> wrote:

>From the early days of S/360 the high-order bit of a full-word address
>pointer has a documented function in standard subroutine linkage of
>indicating the last parameter address for subroutines that accept a
>variable number of parameters, so even if the architecture might not
>restrict using that bit for memory addressing, long-standing software
>standards for AMODE24 and AMODE31 do.
>
>Changing the documented conventions for using the high-order bit of a
>32-bit address word

This convention *already* has to change for
anyone considering moving to AM64 and
using 64-bit pointers. There's no reason why
it should be mandatory for a full 64-bit
application, but disallowed for a 32-bit program.

Updating 32-bit programs to conform to
AM64 requirements is far less onerous
than the massive changes required to
create a 64-bit application.

> to create a new "AMODE32" would potentially
>adversely effect too many things for minimal benefit.

Nobody is affected, and the benefit of going from
a 2 GiB address space to a 4 GiB address space
is a great improvement.

BFN. Paul.

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