Re: ASM vs HLL : absurd war

From: Alex McDonald (alex_mcd_at_btopenworld.com)
Date: 07/12/04 

Date: Sun, 11 Jul 2004 23:09:35 +0000 (UTC)

"Dunny" <paul.dunn4@ntlworld.com> wrote in message
news:2ldpogFbg62iU1@uni-berlin.de...
> In news:40c958f8.0407111128.1fc8487c@posting.google.com,
> Percival <pr_tiglao@yahoo.com> typed:
>
> > BTW, before the oncomming of your (betov) claim that HLA isn't an
> > assembler, there wasn't any need of knowing what an assembler is :-D
>
> I see it as anything that allows you to program in instructions that are
native
> to the chip itself - Delphi has a builtin "assembler" but it's nothing
like as
> powerful as masm. Anything that brings you away from the chipset's
instructions
> by any level of abstraction (such as pascal, c, basic) is a compiler - so
long
> as it converts what you have written into the instructions used by the
chip
> *before* it's run. If it does it at runtime, it's an interpreter :)

Or Forth, which compiles at run-time. Or JIT compilers. These definitions
are way too tight! Generally, an interpreter doesn't generate code at all;
it runs in a "virtual machine" code that the real machine emulates; as an
example, the JVM (Java Virtual Machine) interprets byte-codes, the
"op-codes" that the Java compiler produced. And best we don't tell Betov
about Jasmin -- it's a JVM assembler that produces bytecode that will run on
any processor that hosts JVM...

>
> Such things as Macros and HLA do muddy the waters somewhat, but I believe
that
> macros at least are a secondary function of assemblers,

I'd say an assembler without a macro facility isn't really that useful. The
best assembler of all time (BAL for IBM mainframes) had a superb macro
facility; entire applications were written in macros. Essential for serious
coding.

> so they are not
> compilers as such.

True. 

-- 
Regards
Alex McDonald

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