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

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

On Tue, 14 Mar 2000, Robert Speed wrote:

> There's quite a bit of RISC-OS written directly in ARM.
> In fact, there's quite a number of (ex) Acorn developers who'll quite 
> happily code in it - but then as RISC, there's only a handful of 
> instructions to learn.
> Fine - large data sets can be a bit of a pig, but if you properly think 
> things out, it's fine.
> That's my 2p...

RISC-OS is well known for the sh*t code, tho' ;). In fact, most Acorn
products suffer from it. I know someone very interested in (old) Acorn
OSes, and he had a chat with Sophie Wilson at one point (the guy who wrote
BBC BASIC). Sophie said that the majority of the OS "wasn't in
human-readable form". Sophie was also well-known for not wasting bytes on
variable names, labels, etc..... the OS seems to suffer from that too.
OSWGBPB being a particularly good example (O.S. word get-byte put-byte).
There's all kind of cruft in the OS caused by this type of programming.
It'll be interesting to see what Pace (& the others) do with the Acorn
stuff though - I hear they're basically chucking most of it out.

Cheers,

Alex.


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