The Importance of Terminology's Quality

[Phil Runciman]

>On Thu, 21 Aug 2008 02:36:39 +0000, sln wrote:

>>>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!

>Could you elaborate a little on what it is that you're upset about?  I 
>suspect that there are probably quite a few readers of these posts that

>have designed and built their own processors, and coded them in their
own 
>machine language.  I have, and that was before FPGAs started to make
that 
>exercise quite commonplace.  But I don't see how that's at all relevant

>to the debate about the power or other characteristics of programming 
>languages.  Certainly anyone who's programmed a machine in assembly 
>language has a pretty fair understanding of what the machine and the 
>machine language is doing, even though they don't choose to bang the
bits 
>together manually.

>Hope you get better.

>-- 
>Andrew
>

I hope he gets better too. 

I cannot remember the boot sequences for either the TAC computer or the
H16 series. I used to know them but it became so automatic I could do
them in my sleep... and sometimes did. Late nights were common.

However, no-one has mentioned the fact that even machine code is
interpreted when the actual execution of each instruction is managed by
a micro program. I am not up with modern architectures but many
computers used micro programming to enable them to emulate rival
computers back in the late 60's and 70's. 

I believe ICL in South Africa supplied as a 1900 series that in reality
was System 4 hardware running the 1900 instruction set. It was a 1906T
if I remember correctly. (circa 1977). Perhaps someone out there can
confirm this snippet? (To a customer in Bloemfontein?)

FWIW even high-level language programmers got to know machine code if
they had to interpret memory dumps. I know this was very useful to work
out what went wrong with PL/1 code.

Phil (KDF9 Fan)