[COFF] Re: machine code translation,as mental architecture models

[Dan Cross <crossd@gmail.com>]

A general housekeeping plea.  When quoting someone's text, could we
please use correct attributions?

On Sat, Jul 13, 2024 at 7:46 PM John Levine <johnl@taugh.com> wrote:
> It appears that Douglas McIlroy <douglas.mcilroy@dartmouth.edu> said:

It may appear so based on the quoted text, but in fact Doug did _not_
write the words reproduced here, but rather, was quoting someone else
who did.  In this case, Aron Insinga wrote the text below.
Unfortunately, that this is Aron's contribution to the discussion is
not mentioned anywhere in the quoted portion.

Of course mistakes happen, but it's been happening with increasing
frequency lately, and it's not particularly fair to either the person
who made the original contribution or the person to whom the quotes
are misattributed.

Thanks!

        - Dan C.

> >-=-=-=-=-=-
> >
> >> the DEC PDP-1 MACRO assembler manual says that a macro call
> >> is expanded by copying the *sequence of 'storage words' and
> >> advancing the current location (.) for each word copied*
> >
> >> I am quite surprised.
>
> I looked at the manual and I think he's misreading it. The "words" in
> question are the tokens in the macro definition.
>
> The example macros look pretty straightforward, instructions and
> pseudo-ops that are expanded replacing dummy arguments by actual ones.
> There's no conditional assembly so each macro is just a parameterized
> chunk of code.
>
> https://bitsavers.org/pdf/dec/pdp1/PDP-1_Macro.pdf
>
> R's,
> John