🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1992Dec15.024545.7336@ryn.mro4.dec.com> Peter.Mayne@cao.mts.dec.com writes:
>In article <1992Dec14.203631.16388@CSD-NewsHost.Stanford.EDU>, andy@SAIL.Stanford.EDU (Andy Freeman) writes:
>>Does anyone know why they preferred even/odd to >=0/<0?  Sometimes one
>>has to test the sign bit, so why not use it whenever one can use any
>>bit to split things into two classes?
>
>VMS status codes record more than just true/false. The bottom three bits of
>a status code are encoded as follows:

So?  Any three bits work just as well.

>Opinion: If the status codes were at the high end of the longword, the
>error codes for a particular facility would be scattered all over the
>range instead of in a single group of numbers; harder for us humans to
>comprehend. Given that the VAX architecture has bit test operations,
>why not do it this way?

DEC's dinosaurs had symbolic assemblers and debuggers.  I "remember"
that even some of the 11's had similar software well before the vax
and VMS was invented.

-andy
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