On Sun, 19 Apr 2009 19:25:25 +0100, Scott David Daniels
<scott.dani...@acm.org> wrote:
Chris Jones wrote:
...
Intellectually, assembler programming is the less demanding since its
level of abstraction does not go any further than mapping a few binary
numbers to a small set of usually well-chosen mnemonics. Unless it
features a powerful macro-language that lets the apprentice
create his own high-level patois on top of the assembler, that is.
No, I've dealt with an assembler named 'SLOE' that had an elaborate
mechanism for laying out code in memory in a way that the CPU would
be happy with. Between that and the instruction prefect, the thing
was famously called "immune to programming."
Similarly, TI's DSP products come with a very competant "linear
assembler" that puts you at one remove from the actual assembly
language. This allows it to re-order your code to take advantage of
sets of instructions that can be executed in parallel, shield you
from the fact that the results of some instructions take several
cycles to arrive, and do some wonderfully bizarre loop optimisations.
I have written hand-optimised assembly for those chips, but it's
not for the faint of heart.
--
Rhodri James *-* Wildebeeste Herder to the Masses
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