3 ms·

I haven't. It's probably not fun.

• DonaldFisk 10y ago
  It wasn't easy. Very asymmetric, not many registers, and tiny stack. The only things that were written directly in it were the operating system, and the virtual machines for higher level languages such as COBOL and MPL, because it was too hard to compile to. I worked on the virtual machines. After programming in it, I can assure you that programming in other assembly languages (including x86) is a breeze. I should put my cheat-sheet on the web, if I can still find it.
  • AlphaSite 10y ago
    Isn't the high level Burroughs assembly a compertly insane almost high level language? I looked into implementing it into my assembler and just ran in the other direction when I saw how much unnecessary co plexity there was in the language.
    • pjmlp 10y ago
      On the other hand it allowed for ESPOL and NEWP, two memory safe systems programming languages, with unsafe memory access having to be marked as such.
    • DonaldFisk 10y ago
      B90 was an 8 bit machine and was built at Cumbernauld in Scotland, where I worked. The B900 had similar architecture. There was also a B1900 built in Liège in Belgium, which was a 24 bit machine whose instruction set was designed to run virtual machines (i.e. interpreters). Those systems had a reputation for being slow. I don't know much about them. The Liège plant closed around 1982 and the Cumbernauld plant closed around 1985. Burroughs mainframes (B5000 onwards to A series) may be the ones you're thinking of. These are justifiably praised for being ahead of their time. They were high level stack based machines with 48 bit words + 3 tag bits, and programmed directly in an Algol 60 variant, with additional instructions to enable COBOL to execute efficiently. There was no assembly language needed.