Crawford’s Mainframe Assembler Quiz, answers and part 2

In his October mainframe column, columnist Robert Crawford asked what commonly used Assembler instruction can be used to add three numbers together and place the answer in a fourth location. The answer is Load Address (LA).

Below is Crawford’s answer and the next Assembler Quiz.

Most of us have seen LA used to get the address of a label:

LA R13,SAVEAREA

But if you look in the Principle of Operations manual you will see the actual format of the instruction is as follows:

LA R1,O(X,B)

Where: R1 is the register to receive the address
X is the index register
B is the base register
O is an offset to be added to the sum of the base and index registers

In other words, the magical thing we call an address is actually just a number computed by adding two registers together with an offset. So, at the end of this instruction sequence:
LA R1,4 R1=4
LA R2,3 R2=3
LA R3,2(R1,R2) R3=2+4+3

Register 3 contains 9

We received 9 correct answers to this question. The first three will receive a Startbucks gift card.

New Assembler Quiz: One more quiz before I run out of ideas. What sequence of three instructions can exchange the values of two registers without using memory or a third register? As before, send your answers to editor@searchdatacenter.com and the first three correct answers will win a $5 Starbucks gift card.