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From: firth@sei.cmu.edu (Robert Firth)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: The NeXT Problem
Message-ID: <7399@aw.sei.cmu.edu>
Date: 19 Oct 88 12:04:15 GMT
References: <26435@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU> <5498@juniper.uucp> <250@dataspan.UUCP>
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In article <250@dataspan.UUCP> deraadt@dataspan.UUCP (Theo De Raadt) writes:

>I puke trying to write assembly on RISC machines...

I'd be interested to know whether that's a generally held view.  In
the course of porting a compiler and runtime to the MIPSCo M/500
RISC machine, I wrote a fair amount of assembler, and found it both
easy and pleasant.  Far less bothersome that, say, Vax or MC68020
assembler.

Even the second pass reorganising the code was straightforward (this
is adviseable since the assembler's own reorganiser is not always
very astute).

The most pleasant part was that I didn't have to keep computing
instruction and address mode timings ("now, is it faster to do
a clear or a move of zero? should I scale the index myself or
use the scaled-index mode? do I buy anything making this address
a CSE?"  And so on)