Re: Programming: Not stressful? Yeah, right...


Dave wrote:
> Whoever said programming is a low stress hobby/career has
> obviously never attempted to programm in ASM. For months I was
> debating whether or not I should learn ASM, and for some stupid
> reason, I decided to breakdown and buy a few books about it.
> It's been about 3 months since then, and I've never been so
> stressed out in my entire life trying to learn it. It's just too
> difficult. I have a strong background in C and C++, so I thought
> I'd pick up ASM quickly. Boy, was I ever wrong.
>
> I have a deep respect for all of you ASM programmers out there.
> I really do. I'm glad you had the patience to learn it...

(1) Think in terms of the goal of each set of instructions and hang a
comment to the right of each set (but don't comment every line).

(2) Use "virtually structured" style such that if you use go to, it
flows downward, not to instructions but to pseudo-instruction
placeholders defined only as the location of the next instruction
(often called EQ or EQUATE), or upward to a similar statement in a
structured loop.

A "virtually structured" assembler program is one whose flowchart is
restricted to the Bohm-Jacopini structured constructs exclusively.

(3) Make friends with the macro processor for common small sequences of
instructions. In C the corresponding preprocessor is mostly a waste of
time whereas in assembler it allows the symbolic representation of
otherwise generically named registers and facilities and processing
that depends upon conditions set at assembler time.

(4) Use Hungarian notation

.

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