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From: lothar@tmcsys.UUCP (L. Hirschbiegel)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.questions
Subject: Re: Need Assembly lang. to learn C?
Message-ID: <382@tmcsys.UUCP>
Date: 22 May 91 12:41:56 GMT
References: <1991May21.175914.3681@rodan.acs.syr.edu> <1991May21.210859.9687@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu>
Reply-To: lh@aega84.UUCP (L. Hirschbiegel)
Organization: Private Site
Lines: 38

In article <1991May21.210859.9687@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu> gordon@osiris.cso.uiuc.edu (John Gordon) writes:
>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?
>
>	Absolutely not.  It might be helpful in understanding the finer
>aspects of pointer operations, but it is definitely not necessary.  I have
>been programming in C for several years, and consider myself fairly good
>at it, and I know virtually nothing about assembly language.  I did know
>BASIC and Pascal first, though.
>
>John Gordon

Hmm. You're right, it is definitely not necessary to take an assembler
course prior to starting programming in C. But let's face it: it can make
life much easier. C is close enough to the assembler level. 
Maybe it would be a bit too much to go through a complete
assembler programmers course, but what about some fundamentals (register
concept, addressing modes, stack handling)? 
I suppose it would be much easier for a C beginner with fundamental knowledge
of assembler to understand something like ((*ptr++)<<8) and the whole bunch
of pointer arithmetics, not to mention the concepts of global and local
variables and so on.
Anyway: if you want to write really sophisticated C code (for example 
speed optimized system routines) you will probably always realise concepts
which are closely related to the underlying assembler and/or cpu capabilities.
Or do you REALLY trust your optimizer as much as your own skills... :-) ?

Lothar Hirschbiegel
-- 
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