Why program in Assembly!?

[dC2002]

Hi, I used to be an assembler freak back in the early 90`s.. coding on 6502, 65836 (On the super Nintendo/wildcard device) then motorola 680X0 (amiga`s).. this was a pure hobby back then... but being in the uk I found it hard to find employment with just assemley language coding skills. So late 90`s I taught myself C++ and am happy working now Used to love coding assembler, gave me a buzz... C++ just pays the bills, esp miss cracking them novella anti-copy protections on the amiga ;D

[overnout]

reasom to learn assembly language is explained at www.shareplatform.com

[Chesso]

I prefer Object Pascal or Delphi i should say. Even C++ is a bit too much to waste my time on unless i really need it. It came in handy once when i made a dll plugin for alternate windows shell........for some reason i just didnt get how it was done in delphi

Iv'e seen some Assembler source and it doesn't look very inviting lol.

[Gizmo]

x86 assembly is the whole reason high level languages were invented, LOL. 68K is much friendlier, IMHO. For that matter, even 8051 is somewhat nicer.

Object-oriented languages are fine as long as the problem you are trying to solve fits in the realm of what those tools were designed to do. Step even the slightest bit outside that realm, though, and you are SOL. It pays to remember, however, that the high-level nature of objects and object-oriented languages comes with a price; that price is increased memory footprint and reduced performance.

Any monkey can build a solution when money is no object. Just throw RAM and CPUs at it until the problem goes away. It takes engineering to solve a problem within a given set of constraints. That's when it pays to be familiar with both low- and high-level languages.

As with any problem, it's a matter of choosing the tool best suited to the task at hand.

[Chesso]

That's delphi for me It's only a hobby and i like to get results fast. Iv'e considered taking a look at assembly out of curiosity but haven't had the time to search for information on it good compilers etc.

I don't know too much about it really.

[calgar]

eh, im intrested in learning asm mainly for programming PICs, but the links in this topic for sources are dead, anyone mind linking me up?

[Kaitain]

PICs very often use a basic-like language thesedays. It only takes about 1/2 an hour to learn asm for a simple chip like the old Intel and Motorola 8 bit controllers

For the Intel 8051 & 8052
http://www.8052.com

For the 6502
http://www.6502.org/

[Gizmo]

For the Z80
http://www.z80.info/

The 8080 is the same as the Z80 (indeed, Zilog built the Z80 to be a direct, but more powerful, replacement for the 8080).

There's a fair amount of interesting stuff here for the 6800, 6809, and 68HC11
http://www.programmersheaven.com/zone5/cat26/

The truth of the matter is, though, if you learn the 6502 you pretty well know the 6800, because the 6502 was designed by some of the same engineers who did the 6800. In many ways, the 6502 is streamlined 6800. The 6809 is a souped-up 6800, and the 68HC11 is more of the same, IIRC (it's only been near 20 years since I've worked with them ). I think the 68HC05 is part of the same family as well.

The Zilog Z8 can be found at www.zilog.com. It is its own little chip, rather like the PIC, but is completely register oriented (all of the RAM is the register file).

[Aedan]

Originally Posted by calgar

eh, im intrested in learning asm mainly for programming PICs, but the links in this topic for sources are dead, anyone mind linking me up?

The PICs are microcontrollers, as opposed to microprocessors, so a lot of the work of programming a PIC is actually tied up getting the I/O modules to do what you want them to do. There are actually plenty of PIC tutorials out on the 'net, from basic flashing an LED up to far more complex systems.

[tripo]

The best way to program would be to write most of the code in Higher-Level languages reverting to assembly whenever speed is critical or else precise control over code execution is desired .....But beyond that i believe using Assembly language would be a waste of energy and time .

[Gizmo]

That rather depends on your goal. I defy you to write the code that I put into the Z8 I used on the Keyboard Gizmo that I designed many years ago using a high-level language; I only had 2K of ROM space! As with all tools, you examine the tradeoffs and then pick the best tool or set of tools for the job.

[MrSeanKon]

Originally Posted by Garfield

Refer to this sticky for Assembly Sources.

The link is broken. Can someone update it???
gizmo since you see OcBible let me ask you this:
Is it possible to use a high level programming language (e.g. C#) to write a program for monitoring temperatures, voltages???
A clock generator???
I think it is impossible.

[Gizmo]

Originally Posted by MrSeanKon

The link is broken. Can someone update it???
gizmo since you see OcBible let me ask you this:
Is it possible to use a high level programming language (e.g. C#) to write a program for monitoring temperatures, voltages???
A clock generator???
I think it is impossible.

In C#, I don't believe you can do it. C# is an applications language, not a systems language, like C is.

You could do it in C, but it wouldn't be very pretty.

[MrSeanKon]

OK thanks
But (correct me if I am wrong) this project will be a combination of C and assembly?

[Gizmo]

Most likely pure assembly.

[Allan]

You can call the C functions from C#, but then it wouldn't be pure C# anyway. But you could make the GUI with C#...

I'm sure you can do it with plain C without too much assembly though.

[MrSeanKon]

Originally Posted by Allan

You can call the C functions from C#, but then it wouldn't be pure C# anyway. But you could make the GUI with C#...

Although I am not a programmer I knew that!

Originally Posted by Allan

I'm sure you can do it with plain C without too much assembly though.

Originally Posted by gizmo

Most likely pure assembly.

Someone in Greece told me that we can use pure C to make monitoring and on the fly o/c programs.
Is it possible????

[Gizmo]

Strictly speaking, yes, it is possible. As a practical matter, I have not found situations like this that did not benefit from at least a little assembly language. While it could be done in C, a small amount of assembly mixed in usually provides a cleaner solution.

[MrSeanKon]

But what's your final opinion?
Pure assembly for a project (you understand what I mean) or a combination of C++ and some assembly parts?
C++ is fast I think like assembly?

[Gizmo]

The choice of language depends on the goal.

For pure speed nothing beats assembly. But it is a PITA to program, has a steep learning curve, and a long development cycle.

C is slower than assembly (in some cases as much as 10x slower), and has a larger memory footprint. However, it is not specific to a particular CPU or architecture, or even OS unless you us OS specific features. It also tends to be easier to learn, and has a shorter development cycle.

A good programmer is familiar with several languages, so that he can choose the best tool for the job at hand.

On top of all of this, you have the additional considerations of deploying a program over the Internet, and whether you want to run it from a web page or not.

As an example, there are a great many freely available Flash games on the web. They are written using ActionScript, which is a variation of Javascript. As a result, they can run in pretty much any browser that supports ActionScript, on pretty much any OS. The language is relatively easy to learn, and supports a great many high-level constructs, making the development cycle pretty short.

The price you pay for that flexibility is that the language has a lot of overhead, and because of that it requires a pretty fast cpu to get decent performance.