The Punctilious Programmer The Video Course

The Video Course

22 thoughts on “The Video Course”

  1. Hi Dwoolnright,
    Thanks for this great help. Could you please create some tutorials for Assembler macros?

    Reply

  3. Hi, Dwoolbright; I am taking your video courses which are much better than the other ones I found from youtube. Just want to say a big THANK YOU for all these video courses!

    Eric.

    Reply

  4. This has been of immense help, a very useful course for learning assembler programming, Thank you very much. Kind Regards Karthik

    Reply

  5. Amazing content! The best part is you explained it in a very simple way that anyone can easily understand. THANK YOU for sharing your valuable knowledge.

    Reply
  6. Pingback: Introduction to VSAM for Assembler Programmers: Part 2 | The Punctilious Programmer

  7. This is a comment with feedback on chapter-3.pdf of your book draft at https://punctiliousprogrammer.com/starting-assembler/ (which doesn’t seem to have replies enabled.)

    As an experienced mainframe developer, the column restrictions required for mainframe assembler are probably second nature to you, but they weren’t so obvious to me.

    I tried cut and pasting your sample code from the pdf and assembling it, and immediately hit a number of problems, because the cut and paste from pdf to text format resulted in all the carefully tuned spaces of your sample being lost. I’d adjusted the spacing after the cut and paste manually, but did not appreciate just how picky the assembler would be about spaces. Examples:

    1. The END ASMSKEL, ended up in column 1, which the assembler did not appreciate.
    2. Continued lines had to start in column 16 (I’d incorrectly put them in column 10.)
    3. The continuation ‘X’ characters had to be in column 72 (I think that I’d used column 71 erroneously.)
    4. The DCB parameters had to be in column 16, but some other things had to be in column 10.

    Note that I was using the Dignus assembler with the LzLabs runtime running on Linux (i.e.: not using an actual mainframe for either assembly, nor runtime), but I’d guess that the columnar issues that caused me trouble are probably common to Dignus and the mainframe assembler.

    In this intro chapter, I’d strongly suggest that you detail the column requirements for various parts of the program. If you did so, it would help out clueless newbie’s like me attempting to learn a bit of zos assember (I have a 30 year Linux and Unix history, where expectations of specific column requirements seems completely insane — provided one isn’t trying to use an abhorrent language like python.)

    ps. The email address listed on your http://csc.columbusstate.edu/woolbright/ page appears to be invalid.

    Reply

    1. Thanks, Peeter, for taking time to write.
      – There are formatting requirements listed on page 8 in Chapter 3. I wonder if you have an older version of that chapter?
      – Cutting and pasting the pdf is a problem. I’ll add a link to a text file that contains the sample code. I’ll also look for other chapters that need links to other code.
      The email address on my academic site is good. Just in case, it’s woolbright_david@columbusstate.edu
      David

      Reply

      1. Once I got the program running, I continued reading, and sure enough found the column requirements detailed. They were along with text that said “try this yourself”, which I’d already done. The link for text download will probably be helpful for others.

        Re: your email. I thought it was a bounce error, but looking again, it appears that your server explicitly prohibits you from receiving from protonmail addresses:

        : host ASPMX.L.GOOGLE.COM[74.125.133.27]
        said: 550-5.7.1 The user or domain that you are sending to (or from) has a policy that 550-5.7.1 prohibited the mail that you sent. Please contact
        your domain 550-5.7.1 administrator for further details. For more
        information, please visit 550 5.7.1
        https://support.google.com/a/answer/172179 s186si208845wme.195 – gsmtp (in reply to end of DATA command)

  10. I’m currently learning mainframe assembler and your videos are really helping me get up to speed quickly. I really appreciate that you have this content openly available.

    Do you have a solution key to the practice exercise? Currently, I am going through a Class Powerpoint 1 presentation. Have a lot of programming experience in IBM Mainframe starting from COBOL, CICS, VSAM and so on and so forth. Had theoretical experience in IBM Assembly Language per se but not running programs. Yesterday, I ran a couple of programs successfully from your videos. One of the programs I ran successfully is attached below for your reference.

    May I request you to provide a skeletal code or actual code on how to display values of registers and storage (Character strings and so on) onto a spool. Would greatly appreciate your help and support.

    The email address woolbright_david@columbusstate.edu seems to be invalid and my email bounced.

    Reply

    2. There are several ways to print registers or storage. Some of that is discussed later in the video course. Here is something to use for the moment. It’s the IBM macro called SNAPX. To use it, you have to include the following DCB in your program –

      SNAPXDCB DCB BLKSIZE=882,DSORG=PS,LRECL=125,MACRF=(W),RECFM=VBA, X
      DDNAME=SNAPX

      (THE X HAS TO GO IN THE CONTINUATION COLUMN 72, the DDNAME parm on the continued line starts in column 16)

      You can invoke the macro from inside your program as the program runs with something like this.

      SNAPX DCB=SNAPXDCB,ID=1,STORAGE=(A,Z),PDATA=REGS

      (SNAPX starts in the column you are using for instructions, probably column 10.)
      This will print a dump of strorage between locations A and Z (variables), and it will dump the registers.

      The JCL has to be modified to add the DDNAME from the DCB:

      //G.SNAPX DD SYSOUT=*

      Google SNAPX for details.

      Reply

  12. Hi David,
    In the standard entry and exit video, i was not clear on where the save area 18F has to be define in main program or sub program. if it should be on both program. how we can differentiate. could you please make some clear on this. Also i would need some lecture or discussion about full word boundary and half word boundary. could you please do some favour.

    Reply

    1. Every program you write should have a Save area. When you call a subroutine, the subroutine is responsible for saving the contents of the registers in the calling program’s save area. A fullword boundary is an address that is evenly divisible by 4, so 0, 4, 8, 12, … A halfword boundary is an address that is evenly divisible by 2, so 0, 2, 4, 6, 8, …

      Reply

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