• leisesprecher@feddit.org
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      2 months ago

      Assembly is hard, because you need to understand your problem on multiple levels and get absolute zero guidance by compilers.

      Even C guides you a tiny bit and takes away some of the low level details, so you have more mental capacity to actually solve your problem.

      Oh, and you have a standard library. Assembly seems to involve solving everything yourself. No simple function call to truncate a string or turn a char array to uppercase.

    • CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org
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      2 months ago

      I wouldn’t be able to write Rollercoaster Tycoon in assembly because keeping track of all that code in assembly files must be hell, but people pretending like you need to be some kind of wizard to write assembly code are exaggerating.

      Well, they’ve got a point for the bigger machine codes. Just the barebones specification for x86 is a doorstopper IIRC.

      From what I’ve heard, writing big stuff in assembly comes down to play-acting the compiler yourself on paper, essentially.

        • luciferofastora@lemmy.zip
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          2 months ago

          What language is your pseudocode example modeled after? It vaguely reminds me of some iOs App code I helped debug (Swift?) but I never really learned the language so much as eyeballed it with educated guesses, and even with the few things I double checked it has been a few years, so I have no clue what is or isn’t legal syntax anymore.

        • CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org
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          2 months ago

          TIL. I had tried to understand it a bit, but felt lost pretty fast, and then eventually found out that’s because it’s huge. Is there a good intro to the basic instructions you’re aware of?

          By “play act the compiler” I mean a fairly elaborate system of written notes that significantly exceeds the size of the actual program. Like, it’s no wonder they started thinking about building machine compilers at that stage.

    • luciferofastora@lemmy.zip
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      2 months ago

      Having toyed with video game reverse engineering, I definitely feel like I ought to learn a bit more. I understand mov, pointers and registers, and I think there was some inc and add in the code I read to try to figure out base pointers and pointer paths (using Cheat Engine), but I think knowing some more would serve me well there.

  • davel@lemmy.ml
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    2 months ago

    Assembly code is for writing C compilers, and C compilers are for writing Lisp interpreters.

  • jaybone@lemmy.world
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    2 months ago

    Assembly used to be a required course for CS undergrads in the 90s. Is that no longer the case?

    Also we had to take something called Computer Architecture, which was like an EE class designing circuits with gates and shit.

  • geekworking@lemmy.world
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    2 months ago

    Look at mister fancy pants with and assembler.

    How about entering straight opcode, operand with only a hex keypad and two pairs of 7 segment LEDs. You can only see one set of numbers at a time. You had to write it out on paper to be able to keep track and count positions so you don’t use your spot.

    I had to do this as a project in school. Two 8088 units that we breadboarded to a UART that we used to drive a fiber optic link to communicate with each other with a basic protocol. All descrete components hand wired and coded.

    It made you tie all of skills together into a full system of hardware and software.

  • JoYo@lemmy.ml
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    2 months ago

    I get the feeling that all of these assembly jokes are justifications to avoid learning assembly.

    You can still make syscalls in assembly. Assembly isnt magic. It isn’t starting from the creation of matter and energy, it’s just very specific code.