Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!van-bc!ubc-cs!alberta!edson!news
From: jpenne@ee.ualberta.ca (Jerry Penner)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.apple2
Subject: HLLs vs. Assembly (was Re: IIgs Unzip thing)
Message-ID: <1991Mar30.080418.16299@ee.ualberta.ca>
Date: 30 Mar 91 08:04:18 GMT
References: <15609@smoke.brl.mil> <1991Mar28.012635.14869@nntp-server.caltech.edu> <13156@ucrmath.ucr.edu>
Sender: news@ee.ualberta.ca
Organization: University of Alberta Electrical Engineering
Lines: 28

In article <13156@ucrmath.ucr.edu> rhyde@ucrmath.ucr.edu (randy hyde) writes:
>Gee, Todd don't get so defensive! (:-))

[ stuff about timing critical code and the plethora of Mac/PC SW nuked ]

>One thing really amazes me: people's insistence on writing Operating Systems
>in HLLs like C.  It is actually *easier* to write most of the OS in assembly
>than it is to write it in C.  It's just that modern day OS writers are
>incompetent assembly language programmers so they force C to do the job for
>them.

They might be incompetent assembly language programmers but there is a
bigger reason why OS writers do not want to use assembly language.
Portability.  It makes a lot more economic sense to write in a more
portable language than in assembly.  I think this is the most
important reason OS writers use C.  I agree that using assembly is
probably easier to write an OS in, because you don't have to fight the
HLLs tendencies to constrict you into doing something in a certain
way.  I disagree that most OS designers/writers are incompetent
assembly programmers.  They also probably have orders from mgmt to use C
or some other HLL (like Modula 2 or 3).

[ stuff about OS course deleted ]

-- 
-------------
    Jerry Penner	alberta!bode!jpenne	Edmonton, Alberta, Canada
		 -- Go ahead, make my nanosecond! --