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From: phil@osiris.UUCP (Philip Kos)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.questions,comp.edu,comp.lang.misc
Subject: Re: Teaching Assembler on VAX (BSD 4.3)
Message-ID: <1111@osiris.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 19-May-87 15:25:00 EDT
Article-I.D.: osiris.1111
Posted: Tue May 19 15:25:00 1987
Date-Received: Sat, 23-May-87 03:22:28 EDT
References: <351@aucs.UUCP> <588@maccs.UUCP> <234@brandx.rutgers.edu> <2242@castor.usc.edu>
Organization: Johns Hopkins Hospital
Lines: 20
Summary: it is useful
Xref: mnetor comp.unix.questions:2417 comp.edu:395 comp.lang.misc:405

In article <27848@rochester.ARPA> ken@rochester.UUCP (Ken Yap) writes:
>Frankly I think teaching more than a smattering of assembler is a
>WOMBAT (waste of money, brains and time).  It should only be necessary
>for that 1% of bit-twiddling that needs speed or needs to use a special
>instruction.  Or to read generated code, if you write compilers.

I found a bug in an early version of Pyramid's optimizer by looking at
the generated assembly-language compiler output.  I can't *program* in
Pyramid assembly (they're pretty paranoid about keeping their instruction
instruction set proprietary) but I can mostly read it, thanks to lots o'
work with different machine instruction sets, and it was simple to find
where the loop control variable initialization had been elided by the
optimizer, right after that 20-way switch...

Assembly language is not dead by any means.


...!decvax!decuac!\                                               Phil Kos
  ...!seismo!mimsy!aplcen!osiris!phil           The Johns Hopkins Hospital
...!allegra!/                                                Baltimore, MD