On Tue, 4 Nov 2014 14:30:54 -0800, Charles Mills wrote: >I always thought it was the hex just sort of seemed "system-like" and >decimal numbers were, you know, for those COBOL types. <g> > >I always wondered why did they put two more or less mutually-exclusive data >in two different 12-bit fields? If they had devoted 11 bits to the ABEND >code and one bit to system versus user, we could have had ABEND codes >ranging up to S7FFFFF or U8388607. Whether that would have been good or bad >I will leave as an exercise for the reader. > (ITYM "23")
For S0Cx, the bottom nybble is the hardware interrupt code. This provides some motivation for hex. But still, why decimal? In a CDC operating system, octal ruled. Job time limits were coded in octal numbers of seconds. The ROT was that 100 (octal) seconds was about a minute, and 10000 (octal) seconds was about an hour. At some point this impelled a naive colleague to ask "Are octal seconds bigger than decimal seconds?" Hey, it makes as much sense as KibiBytes and MebiBytes, abbreviated as K and M. And why not allow a simple unsuffixed decimal number, e.g. REGION=100000000? (Or does that actually work? I haven't tried it.) Can "G" (or "Gi") be far behind? -- gil ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
