Yes, I am well aware of that. Point is, the acronym
(the usual expansion
of which you'd not use in polite company ;-)) was used for said register
in all the official manuals, etc.
I am quite sure the engineers at DEC knew what they were doing. I suspect
that the 'suits' didn't spot it until the manuals had already been shipped.
I think this one slipped through the corporate cracks.
One story I heard is that DEC engineers wanted to call the Sign Extension
instruction on the PDP11 'SEX'. They were stopped, and the mnemonic was
changed to SXT. Some other DEC engineers (probably), hearing this story,
decided to get their own back on the managment by calling this register
in the VAX FUBAR. This time it wasn't spotted before it was too late.
So I was told at DEC Training. The PDP11/34 has the SEX Multiplexer
doing the sign extend.
Seems hardware engineering had a little more leeway than the software
guys working on Macro11 and the assembler mnemonics.
-tony
Bill
---
Bill Gates is a Persian cat and a monocle away from being a
villain in a James Bond movie -- Dennis Miller
bpechter@shell.monmouth.com|pechter@pechter.dyndns.org