🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <7104@sugar.hackercorp.com> peter@sugar.hackercorp.com (Peter da Silva) writes:
   > >Assembler is a minus ? What are you getting at ? Assembler programming
   > >certainly is the best and most taxing way of programming for programmers.

   Most taxing, yes. Best, NO!

   I just downloaded a program into my Amiga 3000. It came with source and the
   readme file went on and on about how great it was that this program was in
   assembler and how cool his programming style was and how mad he was that his
   boss was making him program in Aztec C, so he was doing this in his spare
   time...

   Crashes most beautifully on the 3000. See, there are these differences
   between the 68000 and the 68030. You can't see them from C, but in assembly...

So what ? There is one more person who can't program well enough to
know what (very few, really) things he may not do to keep his program
portable. Assembler is , par se, just as binary-portable as C (among
Amigas, that is). Maybe your dislike for assembler programming goes
back to the fact that there is a correlation between unclean
programming methods and assembler programming. That means that people
who programm mainly in assembler are (on the whole) somewhat more
likely to do stupid tricks. But the fact remains that you CAN program
just as portably in assembler and that you can write a nightmare of
incompatiblity in C (or even pascal or basic, if you want to).

   Coding in assembly, other then for runtimes and in critical routines, is
   just a waste of time. Even if your assembly code is 10 times as fast as
   compiled code (unlikely) your program is spending most of its time in the
   Amiga runtime waiting for events...

That is not correct. Many applications require a great deal of
internal computation. But even if it was true in every case: What do
you care ? The judgement whether writing assembler for a definitive
product is a waste of time or not, is a judgement of the programmer.
You , as a user, really shouldn't care about how long it took the
programmer to write this(that is his problem), but merely about how
good a program it is. And an important part in this is speed and size.
And here assembler can beat C handily.

   If a program is written in assembly, I tend to put it back on the shelf.

Again you fail to give a reason for this. If you say: When a program
is incompatible/doesn't multitask/a.s.o. then I don't use it, fine !
But really what point of criciticism is it against a real existing
program in what language it was writen. When I use a program, I don't
care in what language it was writen, but merely how it preforms. 

And assembler has at least a chance of being better than ANY
high-level language.

        Carl Edman


Theorectical Physicist,N.:A physicist whose  | Send mail
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