On 9/27/23 17:27, sur-behoffski wrote:
G'day,
Sorry to hear about your troubles. As you know, I resorted
to extraordinary lengths (lglicua SourceForge project) to get
IM/CD/IUP to compile under GNU/Linux, especially GCC.
Yes, thank you for your effort, although that wasn't a solution to my
actual problem.
As far as I'm aware, no-one tries to write programs directly
in assembler, and only assembler.
Well now you can say you are finally aware of someone. With time maybe
you will discover some more :)
This is because of a simple programming maxim: Try to write
your program in the least number of "simple" or "reasonable"
lines, using programming languages that support high-level
abstractions, as a single line in a high-level language may
translate into many thousands or even millions of lines in
low-level languages such as assembler/machine code.
Actually the exact opposite is more likely to be true: use whatever
language that uses the least abstraction/obfuscation/disconnect from
what you are trying to do. Only asm can do that (and only big
monopolies/corporations would want you to believe otherwise because they
want something they can control or install backdoors into).
Have you ever tried to program an app using asm? I don't think so. Every
program ever written in any language is translated into assembly
language, I'm just skipping over all those steps to get there. And
writing in asm using macros isn't much different from writing in C.
Basically, revert to a lower-level language only when the
higher-level language cannot model it (e.g. some hardware
features of CPUs and/or GPUs), often due to a desire to gain
performance.
Most programs are no faster in asm than they are in any other language.
There are only small sections of code where that is true.
As a rule of thumb, code is read perhaps 10 times more often
than it is written, and it takes perhaps the same amount of
time to write a code in any language -- therefore, always
strive to minimise the drift to lower languages.
Most programs are unreadable spaghetti code, even the ones written in C,
so readability isn't the issue :)
Sometimes, algorithm changes or highly expressive languages
can give startling results. For an example of this, consider
Conway's game of Life:
- Look up HashLife, that can simulate billions of
generations efficiently; and/or
- A YouTube demo of Life in APL, with the final run
given in a single line of APL:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a9xAKttWgP4
----
As a worked example, the C program "hw.c":
#include <stdio.h>
static void p(char *pStr)
{
printf("%s\n", pStr);
}
int main(void)
{
p("Hello, World");
return 0;
}
can be compiled to show the assembly-language output via:
gcc -O0 -Wa,-ahl hw.c
The "-Wa," incantation means 'send the rest of this argument
as a command-line item ("-ahl") to the assembler'.
The gcc command produces the following output:
That output would not assemble in any assembler known to mankind. GCC
obviously isn't a good way to learn assembly, especially with that lame
AT&T syntax and gobs of non-asm directives/pragmas that have nothing to
do with the code but with GCC tasks. The Intel syntax (which is the only
syntax that reads like all processor manuals are written) is way more
readable. And like I said, using the NASM macro capability that program
looks like this in assembly...
locf main
body
invoke p,"Hello World"
rtn 0
endf
locf p,pStr
body
invoke printf,"%s\n",[pStr]
rtn
endf
If you had actually written a program in asm, you would know that :)
The advantage of asm over any higher level language is that I can do
anything I want with it because I'm not limited to only whatever the
language was programmed to allow me to do. I don't have to worry about
gobs of unnecessary type conversions or inane syntax conventions.
Nothing about any program is hidden or abstracted from me. I don't have
to install anything to get it to work, other than NASM (although I
haven't tried to run NASM as a standalone program in Linux like I could
in Windows ... yet. In fact, in Windows I could program, assemble, and
run entire entire apps from just a 1Mb USB stick).
So why are you preaching to me about how you don't like me programming
in assembly? It doesn't matter to you one bit what I do, does it? Of
course not.
Signed,
Andres
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