17 Jan
2023
17 Jan
'23
7:18 p.m.
On 2023-01-17 11:19 a.m., Paul Koning wrote:
Addressing modes barely existed in the 1950s. The
PDP11 introduced a bunch of new ones in 1970; the VAX a bunch more in 1978. "Since
1978" may be true, or at least closer.
I would rather say, Memory barely existed in the 1950s.
And RISC came out in 1988 with 1 memory addressing mode. (well close)
Most of the time new addressing modes are to save space,look at the
intel x86. I like playing with FPGA's as I can have computer with a REAL
word length, like say 10/20/40 bits.
I tend not like writing software, as I never have the algorithms needed.
Some addressing modes went away, like the
self-modifying "C" address mode of the Electrologica X1 --
http://helloworldcollection.de/#Assembler%C2%A0(X1) . Good riddance, actually, but it
certainly was "interesting".
That was case back then to do more with less. Too bad all the clever
machines, seem lost. The same goes for all the interesting 6 bit
character sets. Has anybody seen a '10' character since 1959?
(Unicode has it where?)
On a common metalanguage, there was an attempt to
define such a thing, to allow software to be encoded in a way that could still be
understood centuries from now. I have a paper about it somewhere but my search attempts
are failing on me. I vaguely remember "Rosetta" is part of the name of the
paper, but that just gives me lots of false matches.
Any thing today just matches advertisements.
I am finding most of the time people, wrote in assembler before C and
Unix because high level languages could not support real world
programming problems.
I still am looking for a clear example of how DISPLAYS work
in Algol/Pascal type languages. You can shoot your foot in C,
but a least in C you have a foot.
paul