John Ehrman is a languages planner at the IBM Santa Teresa Laboratory, and our champion in re: assembler matters. John's been active in SHARE for over 25 years, and was one of the early project managers for FORTRAN. He is definitely one of the Good Guys at IBM.

He talked at length about the sorts of data that compilers HAVE to find out about your program, but don't ever tell you. He used as examples of things that compilers can tell you the SLAC Assembler and the new IBM High Level Assembler program listings.

HLASM produces lots of cross-references and a new structured file which could be used to great advantage by an appropriate debugger. There are many people associated with language products (in the Toronto lab, for example) at IBM who are intensely interested in the HLASM structured file. It is probably safe to assume that language products of the future will include a similar facility.

John's workshop was used to collect ideas from the user community to take back to STL for future consideration.