Course Description

z/OS Assembler for Applications Programmers

This course: course objectives; course outline;
Assembler curriculum; Topic list; Course list; Home page

Benefits

Students who complete this course will be able to write or maintain Assembler programs that use hardware instructions introduced with z/Architecture and related techniques introduced with z/OS.

Audience

Experienced Assembler programmers needing to update their knowledge to include hardware and Assembler instructions and techniques that have become available with z/Architecture and z/OS. Systems programmers may also benefit from this course as a first exposure to the new hardware and software.

Prerequisites

Experience writing or maintaining Assembler applications; knowledge of predecessor capabilities such as covered in course C416: Assembler Language: Update.

Related IBM Materials

This course is drawn largely from this IBM manual; access to it in the classroom is recommended but not required:

SA22-7832 - z/Architecture Principles of Operation

• z/Architecture overview
• z/OS overview
• Linkage and AMODE issues
• Register management: preserving left hand word values
• Register management: working with 64-bit values and 32-bit values
• Packed decimal changes: TP
• Packed decimal changes: ASCII and Unicode input and output
• Packed decimal changes: converting between packed decimal and 64-bit integer
• Binary arithmetic: halfword, fullword, doubleword data
• Binary arithmetic: arbitrarily long binary numbers
• Boolean instructions in 64-bit form
• Shifting and rotating bits in registers
• Working with data in ASCII
• Introduction to Unicode
• Working with data in Unicode
• Floating point, as it relates to interlanguage communication
• V1.2 facilities; IARV64
• The Dead Zone
• V1.3 update: AMODE64 programs
• V1.4 update: new cell pool macros
• z990 instruction set
• z9 instruction set
• Facilities
• z/OS V1.5 and HLASM V1.5
• z/OS V1R6 changes
• z/OS V1R7 - Large format data sets
• z/OS V1R8 - new instructions, intro to decimal float
• z/OS V1R9 - nothing new for the Assembler applications programmer

Exercises

There are eight hands-on exercises; five of them demonstrate using Assembler to generate HTML files from EBCDIC, ASCII, or Unicode inputs.