-=> Dr. What wrote to Boraxman <=-
-=> Boraxman wrote to Dr. What <=-
Bo> Was HLA (High Level Assembly) one of those? I did look into it, but I
Bo> always preferred to be explicit about the instructions I used. When I
Bo> use assembler, it is because I am targetting an explicit instruction
Bo> set and want to make the decisions about which instructions to use
Bo> myself. The one time I thought a "generic" solution would be useful is
Bo> when I want assembler that runs on both 32bit and 64bit Intel natively.
DW> I never really got into assembly language other than to know it was
DW> there. I've learned much more as I've been doing more research into the
DW> history of PCs.
DW> I went from BASIC as a kid, straight to FORTRAN, Pascal, LISP, C and
DW> more.
DW> I think I did one class in Univac assembly in college. But it was
DW> mainly to know what was happening "under the hood" when we worked in
DW> the higher level languages.
DW> I did work on some FORTRAN programs for GM 20+ years ago that used an
DW> assembly language subprogram that was self-modifying. The computer had
DW> a fancy instruction they needed to use, but the assembler didn't
DW> support it, so they wrote their subprogram to modify itself to use the
DW> fancy instruction the first time it was called.
DW> Assembler was mostly frowned upon in my work because of the time and
DW> resources it took to use it. People time was more expsensive than
DW> computer time.
I went straight from Basic to Assembler. Mostly because I wanted to write
'machine code' for a while, and at the time, that is what I got, an assembler.
Didn't have a C compiler or anything like that. It was slow going to develop
stuff, especially when it was so easy to hard lock the computer, and this was
on a machine without a reset button. So I would have to turn it off and on to
reset.
But it IS fun, and even recently I've enjoying doing some simply assembler
stuff for Linux, the Vic 20 and for DOS. Something satisfying about having
complete control of the hardware, playing with hardware interrupts, being able
to account for every byte, self modifiable code.
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