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From: mitch@stride1.UUCP (Thomas P. Mitchell)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.questions,comp.edu,comp.lang.misc
Subject: Re: Teaching Assembler on VAX (BSD 4.3)
Message-ID: <672@stride.Stride.COM>
Date: Mon, 1-Jun-87 20:20:55 EDT
Article-I.D.: stride.672
Posted: Mon Jun  1 20:20:55 1987
Date-Received: Wed, 3-Jun-87 04:00:04 EDT
References: <351@aucs.UUCP> <588@maccs.UUCP> <238@emcard.UUCP>
Sender: news@stride.Stride.COM
Reply-To: mitch@stride1.UUCP (Thomas P. Mitchell)
Organization: MicroSage Comp. Sys. Inc., 680 S. Rock Blvd, Reno, NV 89502
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Xref: mnetor comp.unix.questions:2635 comp.edu:426 comp.lang.misc:424

In article <238@emcard.UUCP> ron@emcard.UUCP (Ron Saad (Sys Admin)) writes:
>In article <588@maccs.UUCP> ns@maccs.UUCP (Nicholas Solntseff) writes:
>% In article <351@aucs.UUCP> wdw@aucs.UUCP (Bill Wilder) writes:
>% >default assembler "as" suitable (i.e. friendly enough) for student use?
>% There is NO macro assembler available for the VAX (unlike the PDP-11).  I 
>There's no need to get super fancy - simple macros in m4 will go a

VERY LONG WAY.

In most cases the class would (should) be structured or layered.
At the first students would work at the lowest layer 'raw machine
language'.  At this level binary, octal or hex input might be
considered depending on the 'dues value'.  After this simple
"Assembly Language" without frills. Then the use of Macros and a
preprocessor would be introduced to help with the building of
data structures and other abstractions. 

What they will need is a very powerful debugging tool to see what
their code does..  So the question may become: Are 'adb' and
'sdb' simple enough for a given class?
Thomas P. Mitchell (mitch@stride1.Stride.COM)
Phone:	(702) 322-6868 TWX:	910-395-6073
MicroSage Computer Systems Inc. a Division of Stride Micro.
Opinions expressed are probably or hs.