According to Peter Flass <
peter_flass@yahoo.com>:
Or how a PDP-8 reacts if you combine RAL and RAR.
So much fun with the weird small details.
If you’re not 100% compatible, it’s going to come back and bite someone.
It's more subtle than that. A well defined architecture says what has
to be compatible and what can vary from one model to another. Good
software only depends on the copatible part, or has explicit
dependencies on the parts that aren't so you can rewrite that part for
new models.
S/360 was well defined, Vax was eventually pretty well defined, other
DEC architectures were only defined by their implementation, which as
you noted led to a lot of pain down the road.
--
Regards,
John Levine,
johnl@taugh.com, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies",
Please consider the environment before reading this e-mail.
https://jl.ly
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