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From: rhyde@ucrmath.ucr.edu (randy hyde)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.apple2
Subject: Re: HLLs vs. Assembly
Message-ID: <13348@ucrmath.ucr.edu>
Date: 5 Apr 91 08:17:48 GMT
References: <15682@smoke.brl.mil> <13275@ucrmath.ucr.edu> <15709@smoke.brl.mil>
Organization: University of California, Riverside
Lines: 28

>>>>
NO, but the opposite conversion occurred and was reported in the literature
which you apparently don't read.

>... don't need boat anchors like UNIX slowing us down!

I feel sorry for your students.
<<<

Not only have I read that literatur (from the early '70's I might point out,
my how things have changed since then!), I assign it as reading.

Don't feel sorry for my students.  They come out of that class with a major
prejuidice against assembly removed.  By the time they're seniors they've
written a *lot* of C and Ada code, yet very little assembly.  They are
excited by the end of the quarter.  A good number of them exclaim happily that
"Gee, I really learned assembly language this quarter, it's nowhere near as
bad as I thought it was."  To bad *YOU* never had this experience.

One other comment about the literature you are obviously refering too:
keep in mind that the "C" which UNIX was originally re-written in was
an over-glorified assembler for the PDP-11.  C's syntax (e.g., ++i) was
designed to take advantage of the PDP-11's instruction set and hardware.
When you look at how C has grown (e.g., ANSI C and C++) and you look at
the various architectures it's running on (65c816, 8086, SPARC, R3000, etc.),
I believe you'll discover that compiling UNIX in C won't universally produce
the same results the original programmers found on the PDP-11.
*** Randy Hyde