On Thu, Apr 17, 2008 at 10:37 PM, Andrew Oakley <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>
> James Grabham wrote:
> > OK, so a couple of nights ago, someone from my LUG gave me a few old-ish
> > books ('90s), anyway, theres a beginers guide to Assembly Language
> > there. I started reading, and the first 3 chapters are just about
> > Computer Science, and It's really interesting, Im learning about octal
> > and hex, and other maths stuff as well. Id always though low-level
> > stuff would be really boring... guess I was wrong.
Very wrong :)
>
> I officially retired from machine code when they switched from 8-bit to
> 16-bit. With 8-bit, I could actually memorise then entire 6502
> instruction set in my head, by the numbers (eg. 96 = return from
> subroutine). With 16-bit, it was just far too complicated for the whole
> thing to stick in my head in one go!
>
> Low-level stuff is really interesting, but the problem is these days
> everything is built library on top of another (eg. X-Windows, Gnome)
> that it is almost impossible to achieve anything in machine code.
>
Ah, but I believe just knowing it helps you in all areas of computing.
It gives you a feel for the basics, and leads to the guilty conscience
when using strcmp() in C :)
That said, assembly is still used often enough to optimise routines,
in games, or other performance-critical code, I don't believe there is
no longer a place for it.
Matthew.
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