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Being able to embed assembly instructions directly in the code gave much needed access to all the PDP-10 byte manipulation instruction. I loved BLISS, but some had trouble with the pesky dots needed to indicate value of rather than addresses of variables.

Used it for a couple of years in the mid '70s before moving on to SAIL.

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Oh, I have fond memories of 36-bit byte pointers.

My first two programming jobs were in PDP-10/20 Assembly. Occasionally someone will complain about network specs that say octet instead of byte. And I‘ll just casually say, well some machines had variable byte sizes and go back to what I was doing, waiting for them to start sputtering.

Hi. The only place I have seen equivalent instructions are in Common Lisp

> And I‘ll just casually say, well some machines had variable byte sizes and go back to what I was doing, waiting for them to start sputtering.

Maybe make a remark about word marks, or decimal machines.

Are you sufficiently sputtered yet?

Word marks, as in the Can't Add Doesn't Even Try?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_1620

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