Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!munnari!vuwcomp!rata!newbery
From: newbery@rata.vuw.ac.nz (Michael Newbery)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.programmer
Subject: Re: Knowing Machine Code
Message-ID: <13754@comp.vuw.ac.nz>
Date: 9 Jun 88 23:27:52 GMT
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Sender: news@comp.vuw.ac.nz
Reply-To: newbery@rata.vuw.ac.nz (Michael Newbery)
Organization: Computing Serv. Ctr, Victoria Uni., Wellington, New Zealand
Lines: 17

Alas, I must confess to being intimately acquainted with the intricacies
of B6700 machine code, so I guess my arguments against knowledge of the
underlying machine structure sound hollow. I have also in the past written
a lot of assembly language for various machines. I even confess to ENJOYING
so doing---the thrill of shaving a few cycles off a loop is VERY seductive.
Nevertheless I don't think it is 'better' (moral stance?) to use high
level languages as much as possible: it minimises the pain when the Mac IV
comes out with an 88000 fer instance ;-) I think it would be far better if
MPW Pascal & C were highly optimising compilers so that I did not have to
bypass the compiler and hand code critical bits.
Re the B6700 compilers, ESPOL was just another dialect of Algol, it enabled
you to do anything you could do in assembler, but it wasn't an assembly
language.
I suppose I would have to agree that knowing machine code is valuable, I
favour the holistic approach to programming---the more you know, the
better. Just be aware that things can go wrong, 68000 code that runs
slower on the 68020 because it's too big to fit in cache for instance.