🚀 go-pugleaf

[ I described a wonderful crash-prone assembler program ]

In article <CEDMAN.90Nov21183628@lynx.ps.uci.edu>, cedman@golem.ps.uci.edu (Carl Edman) writes:
> 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. [etc...]

You just don't get it, do you? The lower-level a program is, the more the
individual programmer is responsible for making it work, and handling all
the special cases for all the different systems it might run on.

All you saw was one particular example. OK, here's another: a mandelbrot
program that used a tight inner loop to get the most speed on a 68000. If that
loop was in C I could just recompile with the right flags and get FPU code
and it'd run faster. Or the guy who wrote the program could have easily
done an FPU and a non-FPU version. But as it is I'm out of luck.

It takes longer to code in assembler, and that translates directly to less
software being written, less testing, fewer features, and longer waits for
updates.


> 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 the higher level the code it was written in, the better a program it
is likely to be. Even C is too low level for my tastes, but it'll do until
something better comes along...

>    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.

I've now given *two messages* full of reasons. That should be enough.

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

But almost always the higher level program is a better program for the long
haul.
-- 
Peter da Silva.   `-_-'
<peter@sugar.hackercorp.com>.