What? Have you ever read the x86 information sheets? Teaching someone assembly is a good way to teach them how a computer works -- having them write programs in pure byte code (especially for x86) is both asinine and impractical. Maybe not so much for an extremely extremely simple virtual machine or basic processor, but complex instruction sets like x86 are flat-out beyond writing op-codes by hand. If you don't believe me, just take a poke at the NASM source code. ;)
On 4/8/2011 6:47 PM, Ken Perry wrote:
I am not quite as old as you but I come from the same time zone. I had to learn assembler to hack games on the Vic 20 and the commodore 64 and the TI but more than that when I joined the Air Force and took on Electronics Assembler made my life easier. Then later in life after I lost my site I took software engineering and had to burn chips and while we could have wrote stuff in C it was much easier to control the registers and stuff with ASM. If we used C we allot of the time had to use special assembler keywords to get things to work quite right. If you look on the Fruit Basket page I was also insane enough to write the fruit basket in Assembler for windows xp and it runs in vista. I am not sure if that runs in Windows 7 but I should revisit it and make sure it does. Lost knowledge is not a good thing. Assembler may not be a way I would write a project now days but if you want to teach someone how your computers work there is only one thing better. The one thing better is straight opt codes using a debugger and watching what is going on. Well you could also write straight binary files like a good Fortran coder but who does that any more. That what I should do is create the fruit basket with nothing but a hex editor. Ken -----Original Message----- From: programmingblind-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:programmingblind-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Bill Cox Sent: Friday, April 08, 2011 11:40 AM To: programmingblind@xxxxxxxxxxxxx Subject: Re: Searching for blind programmer to start a school for blind programmers On Fri, Apr 8, 2011 at 11:16 AM, Littlefield, Tyler<tyler@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:Assember? Really? You must be almost as old as me! I can't even find people who care about speed or memory usage anymore.I love assembler. It's a great way to teach people what's going on underthehood and make them think about what they do. Every time I see someone reserve a 100k buffer just because, I cringe. :)We must be from the same generation. I'm 47, and learned to program in machine code on an 8080 based Intel board with a hex keypad and some LEDs. It was a couple of years before I found out that people programmed using assemblers, rather than entering hex by hand. I worry that the new generation's early experience with computers is amazing games and technology so complex they could never realistically hope to understand it. What's the natural path now days for kids to go from playing computer games to writing them? On the old Apple IIs, you just typed list instead of run, and there was all the code. Bill __________ View the list's information and change your settings at //www.freelists.org/list/programmingblind __________ View the list's information and change your settings at //www.freelists.org/list/programmingblind
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