[HECnet] Apparently good news from VSI

[Thomas DeBellis]

Why, indeed.  I think after you've programmed enough assembler, you find 
things to like and detest about all of them.  So I've done BAL-360, 
PDP-10, PDP-11, PDP-8, Intel 80286 and up as well as VAX and Alpha.  
There were others.  Which one did I like most? Why, the ones I got paid 
to work on, of course.

After that, what mattered was how friendly the development environment 
was and in that regard, the 360 really drove me crazy; very poor 
non-interactive debugging tools (at the time).  The PDP-10's debugger 
was wonderful as well as the instruction set and a reasonable amount of 
registers.  The PDP-8 mimicked that to a certain extent, so the fact 
that there is only one accumulator presented an interesting challenge.  
Ditto my experience with the 11.  I honestly don't remember enough VAX 
assembler to comment meaningfully on it.

Passing to the Intel chips, I would really say it mattered what 
development tools you used.  Microsoft's show the Macro-10 heritage and 
the Codeview debugger was completely reasonable. There were a number of 
things that bothered me, but the register file wasn't one of them; not 
after the PDP-8.  The segmented memory model never bothered me at all; 
not when it offered half a gigabyte of virtual address space on the 286 
(2**13 selectors * 64K).  As a matter of fact, I thought it was _great_ 
because it gave more granularity than guard pages, which is all you can 
use on the VAX, Alpha and PDP-10.

But really, only a real nerd (like me) would care about any of this.  
Otherwise, you really can't tell; not in most high level languages.  And 
I think Linus probably said it best when he noted that the Intel chips 
were so fast that register scheduling really didn't matter.  It's true, 
particularly because behind the curtain it's doing register score-boarding.

You might want to check out AMD's 64 bit extensions to the 80x86 ISA; 
I've taught that assembler and it's quite reasonable, particularly if 
you are not using the arcane AT&T syntax: 16 registers and more 
flexibility in using them; very close to the VAX and PDP-10.  I miss 
PushA, though.  Or maybe I like x86-64 because I got paid to use it.

Really, Paul; this is a matter of personal taste more than anything 
else--I don't think it's possible to decide anything more than what you 
like...
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> On 4/22/20 9:44 AM, Paul Koning wrote:
>
> I can see an Alpha, but why would you want a wacko architecture created by Intel?  It's not as if they have any track record of designing nice CPU architectures.
>
> 	paul
>> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>> On Apr 22, 2020, at 9:30 AM, Keith Halewood <Keith.Halewood at pitbulluk.org> wrote:
>>
>> I might actually go out and buy a cheap alpha or itanic at some point now….. if such things exist.
>>
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