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Assembly coding

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Edvard:
Agree to the delphi code... ick. Also agree that it is the programmer themself who determines the quality of the final product. As I mentioned before, I used to program the daylights out of Apple ][e's back in the day. I wrote some AWFUL-looking apps that worked pretty well, (a word processor that was about half the size and speed of the one our computer teacher made us use...) and some very clean coded (after the computer programming teacher got after me) things that either didn't work or were useless. I noticed my programs got a lot cleaner after I figured out the "gosub" command :)
Glad you like the analogy. As for the ability of such individuals to also clean up the sawdust, slag and coal ash, well, you know...

mouser:
assembly coders are a special breed.  it really does require an intricate mind to be good at it; like most programmers of my age i did my share back in the old days.  hard for new programmers to believe but there was a time not all that long ago where computer programming sections of bookstores were FILLED with assembler books for different architectures, 8080, 8088, z80, 68000, etc.

however i have long consider myself in the camp that thinks programming code should promote reuse, readability, modularity, etc.  and from that standpoint assembly should be made illegal ;)

kfitting:
Don't forget that, as mouser mentioned, the area where assembly really shines is DSP.  I've done a little bit back in college, but my dad is currently using assembly in his projects at work: audio DSP.  For routines that need to run as close as possible to real-time, you can't beat the flexibility of Assembly!  Like anything else from C++ to VBA to AutoIt to .net, it depends on what you're trying to do!

For a fairly slick example of someone who does their coding in assembly and seems pretty darn good at it, check out www.grc.com


Kevin

Carol Haynes:
I've done assembly programming since... early/mid nineties, so I know the drill. Saying that it's faster than any compiled language is nonsense, that depends on the skill of the programmer. And the kind of naïve code written by people who do full-application asm programming tends to be worse than what today's C/C++ compilers can produce. Sad but true.
-f0dder (January 09, 2006, 01:41 PM)
--- End quote ---

It is unfair to say that sloppy asm code is no faster than compiled code. You can only compare code written by people of similar standard in their chosen skills - equally sloppy high level code (and there is plenty of that about) will be far slower than ASM code of a similar standard.

Well crafted ASM code will always beat well crafed high level code for time critical functions.

No one in their right mind writes ASM code for full applications any more, and in Windows it would be totally pointless as the Windows library code that it would have to reference almost constantly to make it compatible is written in probably some of the sloppiest and heavily (and badly) patched code ever written on the planet. There probably isn't a single kilobyte of windows code that hasn't had many multiple patches applied over the last 20 years (fixing bugs, shoring up failing security, maintaining backward compatibility with MSDOS 1, in many cases).

ASM still has it's place though in time critical routines for realtime applications.

Actually RISC based machines made ASM quite easy to write very efficient code with a fairly low learning curve.

I have a nostalia for ASM code of yesteryear as I taught assembly language coding for many years in 8 bit and 16 bit environments (but I have no desire to write any more - just a contented feeling to have been there and done that).

I do have colleagues who remember using binary code to bootstrap early computers (rows of switches to enter the startup sequence). God help you if the machine crashed ;)

Anyone out there remember OCCAM ?

mouser:
and let's not forget that asm skills come in very handy when debugging code produced by high level compilers, finding bottlenecks, optimization,etc.

both db and jibz here have found bugs in microsoft compilers by analyzing assembly produced.

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