Jonathan You will be missed! Thanks for all your work on HLASM and helping users over the years.
Don Higgins d...@higgins.net www.donhiggins.org -----Original Message----- From: IBM Mainframe Assembler List <ASSEMBLER-LIST@LISTSERV.UGA.EDU> On Behalf Of Jonathan Scott Sent: Wednesday, February 5, 2025 3:32 PM To: ASSEMBLER-LIST@LISTSERV.UGA.EDU Subject: Jonathan Scott has retired from IBM HLASM team Today, 5th February 2025, was my last day with IBM, where I was HLASM and Toolkit Development and Support Team Leader. Ive been working in Assembler for over 51 years, since January 1974 (when I was a pre-university student with IBM). After working with Altergo Software in London and then at the Gothenburg Universities Computing centre (GUC) in Sweden (also known in Swedish as Göteborgs Datacentral, GD), I returned to IBM in September 1987, where Ive been for over 37 years, working on CICS, MQ and (among other things) HLASM, programming in Assembler and IBMs PL/X, and writing tools using REXX and CMS/TSO Pipelines. I also had the privilege of working with Dr John Ehrman in various discussions about HLASM design and later helping him to support legacy products such as the VS Fortran compiler, while he was putting together his Assembler text. I was appointed as HLASM team leader in June 2017, and as an advanced user of Assembler, I was pleased to be able to implement various HLASM enhancements, including: * Enhancements to AINSERT and lookahead to improve the usability of AINSERT and support the use of sequence symbols in the inserted code * Capability to generate ELF64 for Linux, optionally via GOFF (to support long external names) * Capability to execute the assembler natively under 64-bit Linux * USING addressability limits which apply both to short and long displacements * DROP by address, which can drop a dependent USING * Negative decimal self-defining terms * ASCII and Unicode self-defining terms * Flexible code page support, with control of EBCDIC to ASCII conversion and UTF-8 constants, for example for EBCDIC accented characters I expect those who follow this list can think of some other things we have fixed or improved over the years, often in response to excellent suggestions on this list! Im now looking forward to having more time to play instrumental music (piano, violin and viola) and resume my long-interrupted study of theoretical physics. However, Im still interested in assembler and I intend to continue to follow this list and respond when I can, although I no longer have access to any IBM internal resources so I cant test my guesses before replying as I have done in the past. The IBM HLASM and Toolkit team is now being led by Ramesh Padmanabha (in Canada this is a somewhat geographically dispersed team), who also follows this list (as do various other IBMers). They still have a long list of requirements and suggestions, many of which have already been at least partly prototyped, so I hope to see further useful enhancements in the future. Jonathan Scott (near Hursley, UK)
