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From: m5@bobkat.UUCP
Newsgroups: comp.unix.questions
Subject: Re: Teaching Assembler on VAX (BSD 4.3)
Message-ID: <1028@bobkat.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 28-May-87 09:14:05 EDT
Article-I.D.: bobkat.1028
Posted: Thu May 28 09:14:05 1987
Date-Received: Thu, 4-Jun-87 04:57:38 EDT
References: <7449@brl-adm.ARPA> <1704@umd5.umd.edu>
Reply-To: m5@bobkat.UUCP (Mike McNally (Man from Mars))
Organization: Digital Lynx, Inc; Dallas, TX
Lines: 48

In article <1704@umd5.umd.edu> zben@umd5.umd.edu.UUCP (Ben Cranston) writes:
>                                                  . . .    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).
>-- 
>Copyright 1987 Ben Cranston (you may redistribute ONLY if your recipients can).

Well...Megaroids does in fact contain some assembly language code.  The
in-line assembly is used to (I think) move the stuff around on the
screen.  Along the same lines, the Macintosh graphics software (what's
it called?  it's some cute name ... well whatever) is all assembly
language.

I taught assembly language (pdp 11) at SMU for four semesters, and at
Intel customer training for a couple of years.  In the professional
field, I regularly encountered engineers in iAPX 86 assembly language
classes who were working on projects to be done in a high level
language:  "my manager thought it would be a good idea for me to know
assembly language."  The instruction there was very pragmatic, and of
course the bizarre 86 architecture had to be taught as if it were
perfectly normal (no offense, Intel people -- I don't dislike the 86).
We *never* taught the "part II" class (in Dallas, anyway) that included
the macro processor for ASM86.  The coverage was slight anyway.  (What
a strange macro processor that is, too.  Sort of like m4.)

At SMU, on the other hand, there was a tradition of teaching a happy
little "dream machine" instruction set before actually doing real
work.  I noticed that this was a *severe* mistake -- I had students
attempting to write pdp 11 programs with the phony instructions right
up to the day of the final.  Perhaps my students were ill-prepared, or
perhaps I screwed up, but in any case I abandoned that technique.  At
the level I taught the class (second-semester freshmen), macros were
unthinkable anyway; they did make it easy to provide I/O routines, but
we could have easily used subroutines instead.  I am quite sure that I
could have taught the same class under unix with little or no
modification (probably would have been easier -- calling "write" is a
hell of a lot simpler to explain than is the FIRQB and XRB crud under
RSTS/E).

Well, that's enough from my little brain -- why is this in unix.questions
anyway?

-- 
Mike McNally, mercifully employed at Digital Lynx ---
    Where Plano Road the Mighty Flood of Forest Lane doth meet,
    And Garland fair, whose perfumed air flows soft about my feet...
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