Re: The joy of FORTRAN

On 2/25/25 5:47 PM, Peter Flass wrote:

Scott Lurndal <scott@slp53.sl.home> wrote:

John Ames <commodorejohn@gmail.com> writes:

On Tue, 25 Feb 2025 13:43:06 -0700
Peter Flass <peter_flass@yahoo.com> wrote:
>

Assembler and COBOL were needed but avoided

>
Assembler can be fun.

>
Especially PDP-10 assembler. Wonderful instruction set.

>
Need to play around with -10 assembler sometime.* The -11 architecture
is also very nice (if more limited for Large Programs) - not hard to
see why a number of microprocessor designers took inspiration from it.

>
 From what I've seen of the PDP-10, the VAX-11 instruction set
was superior.   I'm sure the PDP-10 folks will disagree, but
simply thinking about character handling on the PDP-10 gives one
a headache.
>
>

 Au contraire. From what I remember from 50 years ago, The idea of defining
different-sized bytes is a real plus. Pity it was limited to word
boundaries, or it would have been actual BitBlt instructions. Several
machines use byte pointers in memory - Honeywell 6000 EIS instructions, and
I believe XDS Sigma. Quite flexible once you’re used to it.

   Hey ... even a "word" was kinda undefined for
   awhile. Remember octal ? 12-bit "words" ?  :-)