On 10 November 2016 at 11:36, Dimitris Chloupis <kilon.al...@gmail.com> wrote:
> > >> Well, a while before that, i wrote own lobotomized smalltalk >> implementation in C and started generating bindings to Ogre3D engine. I >> even had certain success with it, but then i started grand-rewriting of VM >> and abandoned it. >> That was before i switched to Squeak, then Pharo. So, your incentives >> quite familiar to me :) >> I was quite fun journey, and i learned a lot while doing it.. especially >> about smalltalk. >> >> > I have no interest into implementing Smalltalk at C side , neither my > purpose is education, quite the contrary I try to find way to utilize Pharo > the best way possible without compromising on performance > > >> I don't understand why people find assembly scary or mind-boggling? I >> dived into assembly few months after i learned my first programming >> language, it was Zilog 8-bit CPU. A marvelous gem :) >> And this was always fascinating to feel that you can control the >> computer's behaviour down to a tiniest detail. We were even researching >> what certain i/o ports and interrupts were responsible for by setting >> different bits/bytes here and there and see what happen. >> Because if you don't understand something down to the tiniest detail - >> you cannot be sure that what you doing will work, or work optimally. >> So i find it frustrating that most of programmers don't know and not even >> thinking about touching assembly. Because it very simple, straightforward >> and megalomaniac-rewarding :) >> -- >> Best regards, >> Igor Stasenko. >> > > Assembly is hard, just compare its hello world with the hello world of > other progamming languages. Its just insane. > you are looking at wrong angle. To print 'hello world' in most of languages is a matter of single and simple expression. Which usually considered an elementary operation in this language. It just happens that in assembler the elementary operation is different, but it doesn't means that you cannot look at a single expression (any instruction) and cannot understand what it does.. e.g. - it prints 'hello world' or - it sets the register value both quite simple, elementary and easy to understand, isn't? Just different levels of abstraction. > > The thing is that because we started on early , we experienced assembly > when it used to be fairly simple. I started with an Amstrad CPC 6128 with > 128 kb of ram and 4 mhz CPU, it uses Z80 assembly which is fairly simple > even when compared to Pharo. > > Modern Assembly however have grown on complexity because it depend on the > complexity of the hardware. Personally I don even like to call it a > programming language , just beautified machine code. > i was never considered assemble as a language, it is indeed just a set of CPU instructions. the early assembler compilers is a thin wrappers with slight syntactic sugar here and there.. but not much different to direct instructions. so i would not call it programming language.. since it usually abstracts nothing from direct machine code. > > I agree though Assembly is a lot of fun and a great source of knowledge. > -- Best regards, Igor Stasenko.
