[COFF] ancient macros, machine code translation, as mental architecture models

[John Levine]

According to Aron Insinga <aki at insinga.com>:
>On 7/13/24 19:46, John Levine wrote:
>> I looked at the manual and I think he's misreading it. The "words" in
>> question are the tokens in the macro definition. ...

>Possibly, but they use 'syllables' for tokens (symbols or integers), and 
>they say here that they advance the location counter after each word 
>copied.  If they were copying characters into the input stream, they 
>would not be incrementing the location counter ('.') after each word 
>transferred.

If you really want to know what it did, here's the internals manual.
The description of the macro facility starts on page 19 and it is
quite clear that they're storing a tokenized version of the macros, so
they're not copying characters, but they're not just copying assembled
instructions either.

https://bitsavers.org/pdf/dec/pdp1/F36P_PDP1_Macro_Internals.pdf

  The macro instruction facility in MACRO is both the strongest and weakest part of the program.
  It is the strongest in the sense that it is thot part of the program which contributes most toward
  ease of programming, especially in setting up tables of specialized format. It is the weakest
  in that it is quite inflexible and does not incorporate any of the more significant improvements
  in assembler technology that have occurred since the logic was first written in 1957.

-- 
Regards,
John Levine, johnl at taugh.com, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies",
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