A GCC COBOL status report
A GCC COBOL status report
Posted Feb 15, 2023 0:37 UTC (Wed) by amcrae (guest, #25501)In reply to: A GCC COBOL status report by pbonzini
Parent article: A GCC COBOL status report
The 68000 had the ABCD and SBCD (add/subtract BCD values) so it was definitely expected around the early 80's that new MPU architectures must support COBOL/DIBOL orientated arithmetic.
I remember using RMCOBOL on the Radio Shack TRS-XENIX, which was a heck of a lot better option than BASIC.
IIRC this had a Z80 so it could run the Model II BASIC interpreter, and a 68K which ran Xenix (and used the Z80 for I/O).
RMCOBOL actually had lots of nice features that allowed some serious development for commercial s/w (multi-key database, record locking etc.).
I remember using RMCOBOL on the Radio Shack TRS-XENIX, which was a heck of a lot better option than BASIC.
IIRC this had a Z80 so it could run the Model II BASIC interpreter, and a 68K which ran Xenix (and used the Z80 for I/O).
RMCOBOL actually had lots of nice features that allowed some serious development for commercial s/w (multi-key database, record locking etc.).
Posted Feb 27, 2023 21:51 UTC (Mon)
by nix (subscriber, #2304)
[Link]
This design went nowhere because MOS patented it, so it was never reused in any architecture I'm aware of.
A GCC COBOL status report
The 6502 had a beautiful design: a flag bit (the D bit, bit 3) which changed the normal arithmetic instructions so they operated on BCD instead.