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[Johnny Billquist]

On 2017-12-30 21:15, Robert Armstrong wrote:
>>An AST is an “asynchronous system trap”, otherwise known as an interrupt 
> routine.
> 
>    Rob’s absolutely right about what the acronym means, but I always 
> found the idea of an “asynchronous trap” to be an oxymoron.  When I was 
> in school, “traps” were synchronous with instruction execution, and 
> “interrupts” were asynchronous.   It should be a “SST’, not an “AST”.  
> It was always one of my pet peeves about VMS J

Well, you do know that ASTs are synchronous with instruction execution, 
right? ASTs are a pure software concept, so they are always synchronous 
from that point of view. However, they are asynchronous in regard to 
your application flow of execution.

Interrupts on the other hand are truly asynchronous to instruction 
execution.

In RSX you have both ASTs and SSTs. Did you know that one? :-)

   Johnny

-- 
Johnny Billquist                  || "I'm on a bus
                                   ||  on a psychedelic trip
email: bqt at softjar.se             ||  Reading murder books
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