Re: assembler [was: Re: cheers for gogo]

[Al Hudson <nospam [at] york.ac.uk>]

On Mon, 13 Mar 2000, Chris J/#6 wrote:

> I'm going to back out as it seems that the common belief now is assembly is 
> dead, as such, any arguments for it are outweighed by those against it and 
> apparent alternatives. As such, I don't think I have a viewpoint I can have 
> accepted.

No no no, don't think that, I just hold different views! You keep your
assembler viewpoint, you're more than welcome to it! And you're certainly
not the only person who thinks like that.. assembly certainly isn't dead
(and won't be until we stop using state machines as microprocessors), it's
just not something I care to dabble in for the reasons I set out. You do
as you please, that's one of the benefits of the vast range of development
environments under Linux. 

> I'll close with a brief(ish) summary: I disaggree that assembler is dead, and 
> I believe there is still a use for it (if there is not, why are students on 
> Electronic Engineering courses taught 8085/Z80 or 68000 assembler?

Heck, I was taught Z80. But I was also taught algorithmics, and you use
the best tool to hand. Certainly, compiler theory is one place where
assembler is very much alive. If you want a challenge, try writing your
own assembler, and then your own compiler. Then compare that with the
output of gcc for various algorithms - you'll find there's a lot more to
assembly language than tight, hand-coded loops...

> If noone has done so, and are interested in assembler and linux, then take a 
> look at the asmutils package (can be found on freshmeat) - it contains a 
> whole suite of utils that is still experimental but a definate proof of 
> concept, if nothing else.

Also, have you seen linux-assembly.org (or something like that?) The
discussion on the ELF loading system is fairly interesting, at least.

Cheers,

Alex.


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