I have long had the ambition to tack on HLASM to my repertoire, and I keep putting it off to learn something else instead (or to play Factorio). I used a ~lot~ of assembler on a DEC-10, and as a COBOL developer I did indeed read my own dumps, which sometimes meant I had to figure out what machine instructions were involved in an error. But I never made the logical jump into writing an actual assembler program. Still in my future, I hope. I'm not too old yet.
(Actually I think the problem is the difficulty in writing a hello-world program. It's mind-numbingly simple in REXX or indeed in almost any interpreted language; before I can do it in assembler I have to master TPUT and addressability. Still.) --- Bob Bridges, robhbrid...@gmail.com, cell 336 382-7313 /* A government lottery is a tax on people who are bad at math. -Robert A Heinlein */ -----Original Message----- From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List <IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU> On Behalf Of Bernd Oppolzer Sent: Saturday, September 2, 2023 03:28 I'm currently working for 2 customers (insurance companies), both use "high level" languages like COBOL and PL/1 (and C), but in both companies there is a need for ASSEMBLER coding now and then, be it enhancement to compile supporting routines retrieving sources from CA Librarian libraries (where the software supplier does it wrong) or diagnose programs for checking out IBM errors in CICS web service interfaces or maintenance for tools that the customer wrote in the 1980s (in ASSEMBLER) etc. etc. In both companies I'm the only person who still can code ASSEMBLER, and that's the reason why I'm always busy and still working (I'm 64 now). Furthermore, if you know ASSEMBLER, you can support the COBOL and PL/1 co-workers, when it comes to performance analysis and dump reading etc., because you can tell the meaning of the statements around the error location by looking at the machine code or the ASSEMBLER code in compile listings ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
