pdp-11 assembly standards

[Paul Koning]

> On Jan 10, 2017, at 11:37 AM, Phil Budne <phil at ultimate.com> wrote:
> 
> I've always assumed the P in PAL was for paper tape.
> 
> The Wikipedia artile for PDP-8 says that PAL-8 assembled from paper
> tape into memory, so the A and L could have been for Assembler and Loader.

Could be.  I took it to be PDP11 Assembly Language, but I'll admit that was just made up on the spot and I never saw a real explanation.

> ISTR PAL-11A was also an "absolute" assembler (did not output REL
> files), but there was also a PAL-11R.

The PAL I remember was part of the Paper Tape Software package for the PDP-11.  Two pass assembler, you actually had to feed it the source tape twice, if I remember the manual right.  (I never had to use it for real.)

There's also a non-Macro assembler for RT11 for systems with just 8k of memory.  ASEMBL.SAV?  It came with a separate macro processor called EXPAND, so you could assemble PDP-11 assembly code with macros, it just took more steps.

	paul