[LispM-Hackers] Hex or Octal?

[James A. Crippen]

Argh, I'd hoped not to need to decide one or the other, but it's come
down to it.  Currently I'm working on the printout of operands for the
different classes of ops.  It's a bunch of changes to the
e3MacroInstruction::dump() method.

Here's the problem.  The PC for each instruction in the FEF is being
printed in hex (see memFEFHeader::dump() in memobj.cc).  But in some
random Lispm disassembly not only would the args be printed in octal
(as offsets for call ops are being printed currently) but the PC would
be too.  However the rest of the FEF (and certainly a lot of other
code in e3) prints out hex.  In some cases hex is much more useful,
for example in reading the contents of the pointer field in a word.
In other cases octal is more useful, but precedence points to using
octal.

So should we switch to using octal everywhere for consistency with the
Explorer OS?  Or should we use all hex and perhaps someday change the
Explorer OS to use hex everywhere too?  Or should we continue with the
current ad hoc mix of hex and octal?

'james

-- 
James A. Crippen <james@unlambda.com> ,-./-.  Anchorage, Alaska,
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