glen herrmannsfeldt wrote:
> ArarghMail710NOSPAM@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
wrote:
>
> (snip, someone wrote)
>>> People have been abusing the term "BAL" for over 40 years. Did anyone
>>> here ever actually /use/ it?
>
>> If you mean 360 Assembler F, Yes. 35 years ago, or so. :-)
>
> I thought BAL was assembler D or maybe E. I never used anything
> below F, and it was a long time before I even heard of BAL.
Nope. Basic Assembler, by definition, had no macros at all, and
six-letter symbols. The only actual implementation was the 8K
card-booted package. It optionally started coding in column 25 instead
of column 1 to optimize the speed of punching intermediate data on a
1442 (which had reader and punch in one feed, and punched serially, so
that it was faster if it punched only columns 1-24, retaining the source
as-is in columns 25-72).
For unknown reasons, "BAL" somehow became attached to all 360
assemblers, even though almost no one ever used the actual BAL assembler.
BAL was somewhat analogous to 1401 SPS, but different in that SPS was
distinctly different from Autocoder (though Autocoder offered an SPS
mode), whereas Basic Assembler was a true subset of Macro Assembler.
(44PS Assembler also had no macros, but /did/ have AIF, AGO, SETx, and
so forth.)
--
John W. Kennedy
"The poor have sometimes objected to being governed badly; the rich have
always objected to being governed at all."
-- G. K. Chesterton. "The Man Who Was Thursday"
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