Such an example is that the S/370 architecture specifies that the 64-bit PSW register bit number 32 has to be set to 0 and that doing otherwise leads to an exception. Subsequently, when the S/370-XA architecture was defined, it was stated that this bit would indicate whether the program was a program expecting a 24-bit address architecture or 31-bit address architecture. Thus, most programs that ran on the 24-bit architecture can still run on 31-bit systems; the 64-bit z/Architecture has an additional mode bit for 64-bit addresses, so that those programs, and programs that ran on the 31-bit architecture, can still run on 64-bit systems.
