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From: steve@taumet.com (Stephen Clamage)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: Need Assembly lang. to learn C?
Message-ID: <749@taumet.com>
Date: 26 May 91 18:18:06 GMT
References: <1991May21.175914.3681@rodan.acs.syr.edu> <1991May24.105947.3379@thunder.mcrcim.mcgill.edu>
Organization: Taumetric Corporation, San Diego
Lines: 32

mouse@thunder.mcrcim.mcgill.edu (der Mouse) writes:

>In article <1991May21.175914.3681@rodan.acs.syr.edu>, 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.

>It is entirely possible to learn C, and probably even become proficient
>at it, without knowing any assembly language at all.

By way of support of der Mouses's view, I quote from K&R1, page 2:

    "In addition, essentially all of UNIX applications software is
    written in C; the vast majority of UNIX users (including one of
    the authors of this book) do not even know the PDP-11 assembly
    language."

    "Although C matches the capabilities of many computers, it is
    independent of any particular machine architecture ..."

So it sounds as though K & R don't think it is necessary to know assembly
language in order to learn C.

At some point, a serious programmer must understand the underlying
machines being programmed.  This is a separate idea from needing
to know the machine before learning C.
-- 

Steve Clamage, TauMetric Corp, steve@taumet.com