Re: Continuations

On Wed, 17 Jul 2024 17:09:44 +0000, Scott Lurndal wrote:

"Stephen Fuld" <SFuld@alumni.cmu.edu.invalid> writes:

MitchAlsup1 wrote:
>

>
Especially the COBOL stuff like EDIT and EDIT-and-MARK.

>
>
Regarding EDIT, etc., I think there are three possibilities:
>
1. They were a bad idea from the start and never should have been put
into S/360.
>
2. Putting them into S/360 was the right decision at the time, but the
changing technology (i.e. they wouldn't fit into the initial CISC
microprocessors and RISC showed the functionality could be done other
ways) made putting them into newer designs a bad idea.
>
3. Putting them into S/360 was the right decision at the time but the
workloads changed. There was less requirement for things like actually
printing checks and general ledger reports, and programmers moved away
from COBOL, which was where EDIT was a natural fit, to languages where
there wasn't as natural fit, so not putting EDIT into newer CPUs was
the right decision.
>
I suspect it was mostly number 3, but I think number 2 was a part of it.

>
I also suspect it was (3).  Burroughs medium systems (B3500 etc) used
the edit instruction (EDT) extensively for COBOL.

I suspect that as compute power grew, the kinds of things we wanted out
of EDIT changed.
negative numbers printed in red
negative numbers surrounded with parens (-123.45)
decimal point and comma LOCAL selection
NaN
INFINITY
..
making a fixed EDIT instruction fade into insignificance.