The Importance of Terminology's Quality

[sln at netherlands.com]

On Thu, 21 Aug 2008 02:30:27 GMT, sln at netherlands.com wrote:

>On Wed, 20 Aug 2008 21:18:22 -0500, rpw3 at rpw3.org (Rob Warnock) wrote:
>
>>Martin Gregorie  <martin at see.sig.for.address.invalid> wrote:
>>+---------------
>>| I was fascinated, though by the designs of early assemblers: I first 
>>| learnt Elliott assembler, which required the op codes to be typed on 
>>| octal but used symbolic labels and variable names. Meanwhile a colleague 
>>| had started on a KDF6 which was the opposite - op codes were mnemonics 
>>| but all addresses were absolute and entered in octal. I always wondered 
>>| about the rationale of the KDF6 assembler writers in tackling only the 
>>| easy part of the job.
>>+---------------
>>
>>In the LGP-30, they used hex addresses, sort of[1], but the opcodes
>>(all 16 of them) had single-letter mnemonics chosen so that the
>>low 4 bits of the character codes *were* the correct nibble for
>>the opcode!  ;-}
>>
>>[Or you could type in the actual hex digits, since the low 4 bits
>>of *their* character codes were also their corresponding binary
>>nibble values... "but that would have been wrong".]
>>
>>
>>-Rob
>>
>>[1] The LGP-30 character code was defined before the industry had
>>    yet standardized on a common "hex" character set, so instead of
>>    "0123456789abcdef" they used "0123456789fgjkqw". [The "fgjkqw"
>>    were some random characters on the Flexowriter keyboard whose low
>>    4 bits just happened to be what we now call 0xa-0xf]. Even worse,
>>    the sector addresses of instructions were *not* right-justified
>>    in the machine word (off by one bit), plus because of the shift-
>>    register nature of the accumulator you lost the low bit of each
>>    machine word when you typed in instructions (or read them from
>>    tape), so the address values you used in coding went up by *4*!
>>    That is, machine locations were counted [*and* coded, in both
>>    absolute machine code & assembler] as "0", "4", "8", "j", "10",
>>    "14", "18", "1j" (pronounced "J-teen"!!), etc.
>>
>>-----
>>Rob Warnock			<rpw3 at rpw3.org>
>>627 26th Avenue			<URL:http://rpw3.org/>
>>San Mateo, CA 94403		(650)572-2607
>
>
>Whats os interresting about all this hullabaloo is that nobody has
>coded machine code here, and know's squat about it.
>
>I'm not talking assembly language. Don't you know that there are routines
>that program machine code? Yes, burned in, bitwise encodings that enable
>machine instructions? Nothing below that.
>
>There is nobody here, who ever visited/replied with any thought relavence that can
>be brought foward to any degree, meaning anything, nobody....
>
>sln

At most, your trying to validate you understanding. But you don't pose questions,
you pose terse inflamatory declarations.

You make me sick!

sln