[COFF] Weedhopper? (was: crt0 -- what's in that name?)

[Clem Cole]

On Mon, Jun 12, 2023 at 7:57 PM Greg 'groggy' Lehey <grog at lemis.com> wrote:

> On Monday, 12 June 2023 at 18:39:32 -0400, Clem Cole wrote:
> > On Mon, Jun 12, 2023 at 5:39 PM G. Branden Robinson <
> g.branden.robinson at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> >> It's an ill wind that blows a Fortran runtime using the same convention.
> >
> > Be careful there, weedhopper ...
>
> Now there's a word I have never heard before.  Neither have my
> dictionaries, and Google gets sidetracked.  What's the meaning and the
> background?
>

I was making a joke from those times -- sorry it fell flat [The Kung Fu
series that airs from 1972 to 1975, a young character is taught by an old
blind master, who he called "grasshopper."]

>
> On the other hand, I have heard of BSS and BES.  It was in the DDP-516 (basis
> for the IMP) assembler.  Is that how it found its way into Unix?
>
As I said, it was originally from the United Aircraft assembler and
released to the IBM SHARE community in the late 1950s, which Doug
verified.   As Paul said, in those days, you did not want to waste cycles
setting up memory if you did not need to, and security was not an issue, so
have the assembler/compiler reserve "block common"  after it loaded the
code and initialized data.  To younger programmers,  these machines
(including the variable S/360) do not have a stack. They used it as a
calling convention that saves things in what IBM called the "push down save
area."

Like Paul, while I learned assembler first on the S/360, I don't remember
if a BAL for TSS/360 directive called BSS, but I certainly remember being
taught about the idea of Block Storage and having it drilled into my brain
by my Kung Fu master at the time, Don Gregg.   I've now forgotten what it
did or the special rules for it. Still, I do remember that the APL system
had to be careful about what was in what 'SECT' and, early on, screwing
something up in one of my first assembler tweaks of the APL system and
getting an 'education' about the errors of my way by my master - thus being
taught the differences.😉

Clem
ᐧ
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