I even see jobs from time to time that only require C, though my development platforms these days are Word and Powerpoint. *\:-(
I hadn't run across Nova assembly language, so your remark made me curious. From a few searches, it certainly is an unusual assembly language for a unique machine. This Nova feature particularly seemed unique:
(From Data General NOVA ® Instruction Set Summary at Carl Friend's Minicomputer "Museum".)Magic and Reserved Memory Locations on the Nova
The basic Nova architecture isn't too big on reserved locations or ``magic'' locations, but there are a few. Locations zero and one in physical memory are reserved for the interrupt system, and there are a bank of ``special'' locations in the auto-increment and auto-decrement areas. I'll describe those here. Later machines, of course, have more reserved locations, but those are beyond the scope of this document.
Locations 20 through 37 (octal) in the logical address space (there may be two location 20s in MAPped machines) behave in a special manner when accessed indirectly. When hit via an indirection operation, these locations either increment by one or decrement by one automatically before the value is taken to be used in the effective address. 20 through 27 are the auto-incrementing addresses and 30 through 37 are the auto-decrementing ones. They behave normally when accessed directly. This makes them useful for traversing lists and areas of core.