[Info-vax] Dvorak on Itanic

[VAXman- at SendSpamHere.ORG]

In article <1O-dnfnZ0aKNOBnUnZ2dnUVZ_jCdnZ2d at giganews.com>, "Richard B. Gilbert" <rgilbert88 at comcast.net> writes:
>glen herrmannsfeldt wrote:
>> Tom Linden <tom at kednos.company> wrote:
>> (big snip)
>>  
>>> I have worked with quite a variety of instructions over the last 40 years
>>> and there is none better than VAX, IMO.  As for risc Mips was probably the
>>> best of that ilk, Power PC is a hybrid instruction set and is quite well
>>> designed, specifically they considered how to run legacy code as well.  The
>>> alpha designers were quite cavalier, one even told me once when I  
>>> criticised
>> 
>> For assembly programming, VAX was pretty nice.  But not so
>> many people do (or did when VAX was popular) assembly programming.
>> 
>> -- glen
>
>Very few people program in assembler any longer.  Usually an optimizing 
>compiler can do as well as, or better than, hand optimized code!
>
>The higher level languages allow you to concentrate on solving the 
>problem rather than the nuts and bolts!

Unless, of course, the problem involves the buts and bolts.  Itanium
assembly isn't difficult; just very different from what we here were
or are used to with VAX and Alpha.
  

>Some of us LEARNED programming in assembler; sometimes there wasn't 
>anything else!  SDS 900 series assembler was my first programming 
>language.  I learned COBOL later but never really used it.  I taught 
>myself Fortran from Daniel D. McCracken's book "A Guide to Fortran IV 
>Programming" and then used it to make a decent living for many years, 
>coding for people who hadn't a clue about computers or programming but 
>needed the results.

I learned it the hard way after building my SwTPC 6800 based system.
I had to write the code out longhand, convert mnemonics to the assoc-
iated code, count bytes and then toggle in the program.  


-- 
VAXman- A Bored Certified VMS Kernel Mode Hacker    VAXman(at)TMESIS(dot)ORG

  "Well my son, life is like a beanstalk, isn't it?"