[Info-vax] Hard links on VMS ODS5 disks

[Scott Dorsey]

=?UTF-8?Q?Arne_Vajh=c3=b8j?=  <arne at vajhoej.dk> wrote:
>On 7/26/2023 8:14 AM, Simon Clubley wrote:
>> On 2023-07-25, Chris Townley <news at cct-net.co.uk> wrote:
>>> Never used macro32 - I gave up any low level language after playing with
>>> Zilog Z80 code in the early 80s
>> 
>> Of all the assembly languages I have used (PDP-11, VAX, Alpha, x86, MIPS,
>> ARM, Z80, 8-bit PIC, plus various historical others), I found traditional
>> full ARM to be by far the nicest and 8-bit PIC was easily the most ugly.
>
>"nicest" in what way?

I think the ARM is nicest in terms of being able to know what to do without
having to know strange details about inconsistent instructions.  You can do
any operation in any mode on any register.  The Z-80 is not like that.
I spend all my time thinking about whether I can use the index register for
that or if I have to move the index register into BC first.  It is not nice.

>Traditionally VAX and M68K has been considered the most high level
>and requiring least lines of code per functionality.

The Vax is full of all kinds of very cool instructions and if you know 
all the details about all of them you can do some fine things.  But I
remember once doing a sequence of multiply and add instruction and then
realizing I could use polyd for that and then wondering if it would actually
be faster or slower to use polyd on our machine.  I looked up in the book
and toted up cycles and I am not sure I ever did decide.  I wound up just
leaving it the way it was.

It's possible to do some pretty amazing things... I remember seeing the
output of a compiler on the Cyber 750 that used the floating point normalize
instruction to move characters around.  It was very ingenious but it was
not nice.
--scott

-- 
"C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."