News - Press Release - January 1997

Cole Software LLC and Tachyon Software Team Up to Provide "Long Names" Support for Assembler Debugging

Long names support is now available in Cole Software's " XDC " release X3.2 at maintenance level X32-9701D (01/17/97 or newer), and compatible with Tachyon Software's " 390 Cross Assembler " release 1.2 and greater.

Tachyon Software (http://www.tachyonsoft.com/tachyon) develops and markets a System/390 assembler that executes on PC systems running DOS, Windows (any flavor: 3.x, 95, or NT), UNIX, or OS/2. Tachyon's 390 Cross Assembler is highly compatible with IBM's High Level Assembler. It supports all of HL-ASM's language extensions, and it produces object file output that is essentially identical to that produced by HL-ASM. The object file can be uploaded to the mainframe and then processed directly by the Binder to produce execution ready load modules.

Tachyon's 390 Cross Assembler (like IBM's HL Assembler and its predecessor the H Assembler) supports the definition and usage of symbolic names up to 63 characters long. Unfortunately, the IBM assemblers do not make names longer than 8 characters available in object file "SYM records", the primary source of symbolic information used by XDC . Consequently, XDC has never been able to incorporate long names into its formatted memory displays.

Now, however, Tachyon Software's Dave Bond and Cole Software's Dave Cole have jointly developed a SYM record format that remains compatible with IBM definitions and usages but that can be used to communicate long name information from the assembler to XDC . This new technology frees XDC users from the limitations of 8-character symbol names. It also facilitates their usage of IBM mapping macros which, more and more, are using long names in their field definitions.

For more information about XDC Release X3.2, see our press release . To obtain the maintenance that adds long name support to XDC, click here, then download the file named X32MAINT.ZIP .

For more information about the 390 Cross Assembler , check out http://www.tachyonsoft.com/tachyon. It's a really nice product!

For more information on Cole Software or XDC contact Robert W. Shimizu at 1 (800) XDC-5150 or sales@colesoft.com.