johnl@ima.UUCP (08/20/83)
#R:ulysses:-55500:ima:15900011:000:872 ima!johnl Aug 19 17:42:00 1983 ***** ima:general / ism780!jim / 1:47 pm Aug 19, 1983 The 32v people who violated DEC's calling conventions and neglected to save r2-r5 in C routines, presumably because they are used as temporaries by structure copies and complex expressions, made a mistake. These registers now must be saved upon each interrupt which calls or leads to the call of a C routine, which is very costly, while the actual occurrence of uses of r2-r5 is minimal. I think the Bell VAX assembler language manual was pulled because the design and implementation were too embarrassing. The SysV assembler is a different program, but Bell still hasn't gotten around to providing a manual. It is more than a little ironic that someone at MH should be asking the net about history of Bell documentation practices. Jim Balter (decvax!yale!ima!jim), Interactive Systems Corp -------- ----------