wildbill@ucbvax.UUCP (William J. Laubenheimer) (05/26/84)
The first place I encountered the abbreviation was on a PDP-8, where it
was an assembler pseudo-op standing for "Block Started by Symbol", referring
to the fact that any symbol associated with the declaration took as its
address the first address reserved for the block. PDP-11's had the same
pseudo-op, plus a complementary one, BES = "Block Ended by Symbol",
in which the symbol took the address of the first location after the
area reserved. I presume that this is the source for the name.
____ Bill Laubenheimer
___ / \ ___ UC-Berkeley Computer Science
/ \ | o o | / \ ucbvax!wildbill
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...Killjoy was here!