Re: Structures in Assembly Language

From: hutch-- (hutch_at_movsd.com)
Date: 08/19/04

  • Next message: f0dder: "Re: Structures in Assembly Language" 
    Date: 18 Aug 2004 18:07:58 -0700

    > To beginners:

    This is claptrap, assemblers have had the capacity to write and
    manipulate structures since before 1990 and structures (C), UDTs
    (basic), records (pascal) are a normal part of programming. The
    difference is some assembler CAN handle structures and some CANNOT.
    When you have to write code for an operating system that commonly uses
    structures, you either use an assembler powerful enough to do it
    easily or get stuck with some dirty fudge to try and emulate something
    that is very simple.

    It may suit peddlers or toys that are not powerful enough to write
    Windows code properly to boast of what their toys cannot do but if you
    need to write successful Windows code, you will do it with an
    assembler that is powerful enough to handle the layout of the
    operating system API functions as native assembler code.

    A structure is in fact an ARRAY but with the difference that all
    members do not have to be the same size. The great advantage of using
    structures is that you can address each member by name and you ALWAYS
    get the correct address by doing so. There is nothing clever about
    manually coding array offsets through multiple levels of indirection,
    just highly unreliable code that is nearly impossible to debug and
    fix.

    When Betov quotes a piece of the example code from MASM32, he fails to
    address WHY a CreateWindowEx() API uses a WNDCLASSEX structure.
    Windows code can be complicated if you do it wrong and to create a
    Window, you first must register a class for the Window. You use the
    WNDCLASSEX structure like a parameter list to set up the Window class
    and then you create the Window using the CreateWindowEx().

    Its one of th worst kept secrets that Microsoft had technical problems
    with the design of early 32 bit Windows so they hired a pile of VAX
    mainframe programmers to design the PE file format used in 32 bit
    Windows. This is where the nested structures came from and without
    that capacity, coding Windows assembler is an unreliable unfixable pig
    that does not work properly.

    This much I will say to programmers who are learning both Windows and
    assembler coding, don't be mislead by bullsh*t coming out of Betov
    when he does not have the experience coding Windows software. Without
    normal capacity like structures, you are left with simplistic capacity
    that cannot do the complicated stuff that Windows is made with.

    Regards,

    hutch at movsd dot com

  • Next message: f0dder: "Re: Structures in Assembly Language"

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