ASM370 - Anyone still use assembly?

Author

Anyone still use assembly?

Old Roadie

2007-07-28, 9:58 pm

hi, all. Bill Becker here, for those that may remember me.

Is assembler still being used? Did I make the right move getting out of
systems programming and into the bicycle business?

I was looking at some of my old code the other day, and was pleasantly
surprised to see that I still understood all of it! Even the channel
programming and qedit/stop/modify stuff.

Some of the code written while stoned, however, still remains a mystery.
But last I remember, surprising in and of itself, ran just fine to
normal completion (CC=0, not abend'ing)

Thinking about retirement now. But still looking for something to do
besides wrench on bikes, so I'm going to throw my hat into the fray and
perhaps wrench on code again part time. Any opportunities out there?

Regards,
Bill

ldroadie at gmail (please use subject "asm370")

John W. Kennedy

2007-07-28, 9:58 pm

Old Roadie wrote:
> hi, all. Bill Becker here, for those that may remember me.
>
> Is assembler still being used? Did I make the right move getting out of
> systems programming and into the bicycle business?
>
> I was looking at some of my old code the other day, and was pleasantly
> surprised to see that I still understood all of it! Even the channel
> programming and qedit/stop/modify stuff.
>
> Some of the code written while stoned, however, still remains a mystery.
> But last I remember, surprising in and of itself, ran just fine to
> normal completion (CC=0, not abend'ing)
>
> Thinking about retirement now. But still looking for something to do
> besides wrench on bikes, so I'm going to throw my hat into the fray and
> perhaps wrench on code again part time. Any opportunities out there?

There's less need for assembler these days -- there are far fewer APIs
that are assembler-only, performance is rarely as critical as it used to
be, and C is available instead. And there are about twice as many
op-codes nowadays, some for Unicode handling and IEEE floating point,
but also a large addition to handle 64-bit registers and a whole new set
of instructions conceptually imported from the RISC world. Except for
packed decimal, it's possible to write entire programs without using a
single S/360 opcode.
--
John W. Kennedy
Read the remains of Shakespeare's lost play, now annotated!
http://pws.prserv.net/jwkennedy/Dou...hood/index.html

SkippyPB

2007-07-29, 6:57 pm

On Sat, 28 Jul 2007 21:44:39 -0400, "John W. Kennedy"
<jwkenne@attglobal.net> wrote:

>Old Roadie wrote:
>
>There's less need for assembler these days -- there are far fewer APIs
>that are assembler-only, performance is rarely as critical as it used to
>be, and C is available instead. And there are about twice as many
>op-codes nowadays, some for Unicode handling and IEEE floating point,
>but also a large addition to handle 64-bit registers and a whole new set
>of instructions conceptually imported from the RISC world. Except for
>packed decimal, it's possible to write entire programs without using a
>single S/360 opcode.

It is becoming somewhat of a lost art. My employer has several
hundred programs written in Assembler, but we haven't written any new
ones in over 10 years and the old ones do what they are supposed to do
without modification except some upgrades done to take advantage of
the new op codes for the larger addresses. I personally haven't
written any Assembler code in about 8 or 9 years. All Cobol now.

Regards,
////
(o o)
-oOO--(_)--OOo-

** Norm's Greetings on US TV Show "Cheers" **

SAM: "What'll you have Normie?"
NORM: "Well, I'm in a gambling mood Sammy. I'll take a glass of whatever
comes out of that tap."
SAM: "Looks like beer, Norm."
NORM: "Call me Mister Lucky."
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Remove nospam to email me.

Steve

Alistair

2007-08-01, 6:58 pm

On 29 Jul, 01:56, Old Roadie <road.bi...@hotmail.com> wrote:
> hi, all. Bill Becker here, for those that may remember me.
>
> Is assembler still being used? Did I make the right move getting out of
> systems programming and into the bicycle business?
>
> I was looking at some of my old code the other day, and was pleasantly
> surprised to see that I still understood all of it! Even the channel
> programming and qedit/stop/modify stuff.
>
> Some of the code written while stoned, however, still remains a mystery.
> But last I remember, surprising in and of itself, ran just fine to
> normal completion (CC=0, not abend'ing)
>
> Thinking about retirement now. But still looking for something to do
> besides wrench on bikes, so I'm going to throw my hat into the fray and
> perhaps wrench on code again part time. Any opportunities out there?
>
> Regards,
> Bill
>
> ldroadie at gmail (please use subject "asm370")

You might be interested in getting hold of the PC/370 application
available on the internet (I think that 4.2 is the latest) so that you
can get some practice in. Also, there is a Java project which is
creating a pc version of IBM assembler called z390 assembler. Both are
products of Don Higgins.

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