On Wednesday, 96/01/24, John Poltorak wrote to David Noon about "Pl/i
Miscellanea" as follows:

JP> I was brought up on mainframe assembler, but could never 
JP> get the hang of it on PC's... The idea that a word was two 
JP> bytes was something I couldn't come to terms with :-).

Hi John,

I was also brought up on IBM mainframe assembler -- over 20 years ago!
However, in the 1970's I also encountered the worst range of machines
ever built, the DEC PDP-11, and learned its assembler, Macro-11.

Since the designers at Intel all worshipped DEC, the Intel has the
same dumb little-endian architecture, very similar instruction
repertoire, same word = 2 bytes, and its assembler language is almost a
clone of Macro-11.

So, I guess the PDP-11 was useful after all. It gave me some
preparation for assembler under PC-DOS, Windows and OS/2.

JP> You wouldn't have come across a book such as 'PC Assembler 
JP> for mainframers' would you? It would be handy having such a 
JP> book...

No. I used Harley Hahn's book that came bundled with MASM.

Just wait until you try floating point. Extended precision has only 10
bytes on an Intel. It is the "contracted" shade of meaning of the word
"extended".

Regards

Dave


 * KWQ/2 1.2i * I wish life had a scroll-back buffer.....
--- Maximus/2 3.01