Re: book on assembly language

>Reply to article by: Betov <betov@xxxxxxx>
>Date written: 06 Apr 2005 15:12:26 GMT
>MsgID:<XnF9630B177174AAbetovfreefr@xxxxxxxxxxxx>

>>|>ASM is more properly taught as a speciality langauge in electronics
>>|>and embedded computing classes.

>>|>As a general purpose langauge, ASM had it's day and it is over.

>>|Thanks for coming here, and telling us that we
>>|do not exist, and that we are dead... But, if
>>|so, who are you talking to?

>>At least this time a can particular agree with The Sage
>>(isn't _that_ troll styled yet).

>>Yes: ASM is a machine specific rather than a general purpose language.
>>Yes: ASM is the language for well educated engineers,
>> while HLL/HLA may be good to satisfy user-level merchants greed.
>>Yes: ASM days are over for all the 'fast but dirty coders' who sell
>> their LIB-copied and untested *** to the unaware masses.

>Depends on who say the words. :))

A fact is a fact no matter who tells it.

>Yes, of course, this is the state of facts. We are
>here to try to review these facts, and, as long as
>there will be Asmers outputing valid Applications,
>and Assemblers authors creating the required Tools
>for this purpose, the game will not be over.

The only "applications" Asmers are outputting today are more assemblers. Case in
point...

>In some way, nowadays Assembly is more a fresh new
>concept than an old thing, that we would have to
>rescussitate from the grave-yard. As you know, none
>of us is rewriting Debug.exe, TASM or MASM.

See what I mean? The only "fresh new concept" you have is to write another
assembler, as if you blindly believe that the more assemblers you output, the
more likely someone is to someday write an application in ASM.

>But i do not really agrea with point 2: "ASM is the
>language for well educated engineers". There is no
>effective reason for this to be true.

You are in denial of the facts. All you can do is disagree because you have
nothing factual to back up your religious claims.

>If Assembly is not (not YET) the proper Tool for true
>beginners, or for "uneducated engineers" :)) , - though
>i honnestly think that we are coming close to... - this
>is only a matter of Interfaces Developements. There
>is no reason why an Assembly Environnement could not
>do the exact same things as any HLL, the exact same
>way. We can do the same, and we can do better. Nothing
>but a big QUANTITY of work.

Aside from the self-perpetuating assembler market, what other valid useful ASM
applications are there on your computer, being used right now? By vaild useful
ASM applications, I mean things like email programs, web browsers, full fledged
graphics programs, CAD, full-fledged games, and so on. I have zero, exactly the
same number that every one of the people at my work and my friends have. Think
about how many valid ASM applications are being commercialized or even seriously
being considered by any commercial company in the world? There are a couple of
lame OSes that are written completely in ASM but they have trouble even giving
those away. I have seen thousands of trivial "Hello World!" and other "demo" or
"example" programs but nothing significant.

>There is nothing necessary elitist, at all, in Assembly
>language. After all, bulding a descent Web Site, or a
>good Documentation, is way more difficult, way more
>painfull, than writting an Application in Assembly, and
>nobody calls these so killing tasks "elistist".

Programmers don't avoid writing applications in ASM because, as you pretend, ASM
is difficult or "elitist". Companies and programmers abandoned ASM years ago,
because programming in a higher-level language is superior to in terms of
maintainability, readability, and quality due to ease of debugging. In other
words, except for the ASM fanatics in this newsgroup, the rest of the world
agrees that ASM sucks.

The Sage

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"The men that American people admire most extravagantly are
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