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From: ken@rochester.ARPA (Ken Yap)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.questions,comp.edu
Subject: Re: Teaching Assembler on VAX (BSD 4.3)
Message-ID: <28069@rochester.ARPA>
Date: Tue, 26-May-87 01:00:05 EDT
Article-I.D.: rocheste.28069
Posted: Tue May 26 01:00:05 1987
Date-Received: Wed, 27-May-87 00:39:51 EDT
References: <7449@brl-adm.ARPA> <1704@umd5.umd.edu>
Reply-To: ken@rochester.UUCP (Ken Yap)
Organization: U of Rochester, CS Dept, Rochester, NY
Lines: 14
Xref: mnetor comp.unix.questions:2539 comp.edu:409

Let me just say that I support, nay would promote, the teaching of one
assembly language when coupled with a computer architecture course. All
of the respondents who pointed out that assembly language is still
useful somewhere gave examples that required knowledge of machine
innards, e.g.  driver hacking, compiler checking, etc. With knowledge
of the syntax of a couple of assemblers, you can go on to conquer any
machine. Nobody taught me assembler. I started off with a KIM-1, then
went on to PDP-11 MACRO and haven't looked back since.

Teaching algorithms in assembler is a dead duck. System hacking in
assembler is also mostly unnecessary. Even the monster Cyber's
utilities could be written in an albeit non-standard Pascal.

	Ken