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From: phil@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu (Phil Howard KA9WGN)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.questions
Subject: Re: Need Assembly lang. to learn C?
Message-ID: <1991May21.212024.11580@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu>
Date: 21 May 91 21:20:24 GMT
References: <1991May21.175914.3681@rodan.acs.syr.edu>
Organization: University of Illinois at Urbana
Lines: 29

ldstern@rodan.acs.syr.edu (Larry Stern) writes:

>To all: a local instructor, who teaches C, has told several of us who are
>interested in his course that we should take an Assembly language course
>first. Even though his course is C in the DOS environment and a knowledge
>of 8088/80286 would no doubt be useful, we are wondering if this is really
>necessary. Any comments from C programmers?

I have known assembly language for some machines well, and that did help
understand things like endianess issues.  However I think your instructor
is just taking the short way out.  Most of what you learn in assembly is
just not needed to learn C.  Some of it is helpful, but that could all be
included in the course.  I've programmed in C on machines where I did NOT
know the assembly language for, and was relieved at not having to learn
yet another machine.  I know assembly language for IBM 370 mainframes very
well, and have done assembly language programming on 6502, 8088, and 68000.

I would also advise AGAINST getting the assembly language book unless you
do so for at least 2 or 3 different machine architectures, including at least
one little endian (VAX, 80x86) and one big endian (370, 68000) machine type.
Be wary of assembly books for IBM 370 in particular, as they seems to be heavy
on using decimal instruction set for business programs which have no place
ever being written in assembly in the first place.  In fact MOST examples in
assembly language books SHOULD be written in something like C anyway.
-- 
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