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From: zben@umd5.umd.edu (Ben Cranston)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.questions
Subject: Re: Teaching Assembler on VAX (BSD 4.3)
Message-ID: <1704@umd5.umd.edu>
Date: Mon, 25-May-87 22:59:55 EDT
Article-I.D.: umd5.1704
Posted: Mon May 25 22:59:55 1987
Date-Received: Tue, 26-May-87 05:42:58 EDT
References: <7449@brl-adm.ARPA>
Reply-To: zben@umd5.umd.edu.UUCP (Ben Cranston)
Organization: University of Maryland, College Park
Lines: 39
Summary: Overview

This is an issue that touches close to the hearts of many, ergo the 
surfeit of heat and deficit of light.  When do we move the discussion
of assembly language from the Computer Science undergraduate program
to the "history of technology" curriculum?  As an aside, I'd surely
like to know if the Japanese are teaching assembly language.

One thing to keep in mind is that the majority of readers of this net
are using Unix systems, and have (rightly or wrongly) bought into the
canard that assembly language is dead.  Thus they are likely to advance
the argument that teaching assembly language is a stupid thing to do,
rather than try to solve the problem as presented.

I may be one of the worst assembler-bigots around, but UMD5 has been
three different machines in the past 5 years (PDP-11, uVax, 750) and
I haven't writen a line of assembly code.  I've had a Mac Plus for more
than a year, and haven't written a line of assembly code.  It's quite
impressive that Megaroids (an "asteroids" clone for the Mac) is entirely
written in MegaMax C and suffers no lossage due to time constraints
(this kind of real-time environment is where any such lossage should show).

Yes, knowing some assembly languages can really help when dealing with
bogus compilers, and I have found bad code bugs in both the IBM Pascal
and Fortran H compilers by inspecting the machine language output.
I used to write huge gory assembly macros, but stopped because none of
my co-workers could understand them.  I still do macros, but simple ones
that only solve the task at hand, rather than huge gory packages that
try to be everything to everybody and end up being nothing to nobody...

Is it possible that the "ultimate dead language" comment on the AS man 
page might be a comment on the PDP-11 instruction set itself, rather than
generically condemning all assembly languages?  Since some of the wartier
"features" of C (undefined fill on right shift, promotion of float 
to double on function call, etc) can be traced directly to the uglyness
of the PDP-11 instruction set, one can certainly sympathize...
-- 
Copyright 1987 Ben Cranston (you may redistribute ONLY if your recipients can).
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