6 Jan
2022
6 Jan
'22
3:37 a.m.
On Wed, Jan 5, 2022, 8:27 PM Douglas McIlroy <douglas.mcilroy(a)dartmouth.edu wrote:
That makes a lot of sense. I've found errors and omissions in the assembler
documentation for the odd system call for V7 and System III ports. A little
sloppy I thought when I noticed. I'll have to see if I can dig one up
again...
Warner
It would be
nice to hear about the rationale from a primary source.
Assembly language was deemed a last resort, especially as portability
was coming to the fore. As I wrote in A Research Unix Reader,
"Assembly language and magic constants gradually declined from the
status of the 'real truth' (v4) to utterly forgotten (v8)." In v7,
assembler usage was demoted to the bottom of syscall man pages. It
could also be found in /usr/src/libc/sys/*.s