david@ztivax.UUCP (05/12/86)
>Here's a perverse thought: Has anyone done any research on >architechures to help people writing /assembly language/? (Maybe the >PDP-11, VAX or IBM-370 architechures are optimal, or maybe no one has >ever considered making life easier for those who spend their lives >coding "down unda.") > Landon Dyer "If Business is War, then > Atari Corp. I'm a Prisoner of Business!" The old MIL STD 1750 is sort of like that. A fundamental concept is you can do everything with anything: "orthagonality". It really did make it easy to program in assembler. There are new versions which are being made by Fairchild and Honeywell, as I remember, and are very fast. -- David Smyth seismo!unido!ztivax!david
herndon@umn-cs.UUCP (05/16/86)
I believe the military did some research to find architectures which optimized programmer performance for assembly languages. I don't know of any references, but someone from Johns Hopkins applied physics lab once made the claim that the PDP-11 and the ANYUK-20 (?sp) were far and away the best machines for helping programmers produce working code quickly. Interpreters for machines are also quite old; back before any machines had floating point hardware, it was not an uncommon practice to program in pseudo-ops which were then interpreted. These pseudo-ops often looked much like P-codes. This is mentioned in some of the introductory textbooks on computer languages. Anybody else hear about anything like either of these? Robert Herndon ...!ihnp4!umn-cs!herndon