🚀 go-pugleaf

Date: 5 May 1984 01:20-EDT
From: Tim McNerney <uw-beaver!TIM@MIT-MC>
Subject:  Teaching assembly language programming, Mac style
To: FISCHER@RUTGERS
Cc: TIM@MIT-MC, info-mac@SUMEX-AIM
In-Reply-To: Msg of 3 May 84 16:41:36 EDT from Ron <FISCHER at RUTGERS.ARPA>

While the two Mac arrangement will be indispensible to DEVELOPERS 
who want full control of the screen for their software products, for
TEACHING purposes, the MacAssembler is probably not the right thing.
When programming in assembly language it is so easy to screw oneself
that for students first learning about how machines work inside, a
constrained environment like MacPascal is much preferable.

It looks like there is a need for a EDUCATIONAL PRODUCT here folks!
How about a 68000 assembler and a very "careful" stepper/debugger 
that provides extensive error checking and displays the state of 
the registers and relevant segments of memory while the program is
running?  How about providing a "dial" that you can turn to slow
your program down to a comfortable crawl if things are happening
too quickly?

Remember the days when computers had blinking lights, and you could
tell what your program was doing just by gazing at the dancing patterns,
or by sticking an FM radio next to the processor and listening to the
buzzing and humming?  Well, times haven't changed that much, we just
have "bitmapped displays" instead of "front panels" and "sound
generator chips" instead of transistor radios, that's all...


	Tim McNerney
	<TIM at MIT-MC.ARPA>