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Date:	Sat, 2 Aug 2003 08:49:58 PDT7
From:	Tom Novelli <tcn@mtdata.com >
Reply-To:	scoug-programming@scoug.com
To:	< "scoug-programming@scoug.com" > scoug-programming@scoug.com >
Subject:	SCOUG-Programming: Re: Warpstock 2003 Presentation

Content Type: text/plain

Hello all; I've been lurking for a while and just thought I'd butt in for
a second...

On Thu, 31 Jul 2003, Lynn H. Maxson wrote:

> (1) "Zen of Assembly Language" (Michael Abrash), (2) "Assembly Language
> from Square One" (Jeff Duntemann), and (3) "Assembly Language Magic"
> (William Murray/Chris Pappas).

The Abrash book was pretty helpful even though it only covered the 8086.
Murray & Pappas taught at the community college I went to; they have a
reputation for writing books for their own courses, so I wonder if it's
any good at all :) I can't say; I stayed out of the CS program, for good
reason! Anyhow, all you really need is instruction set documentation,
some nifty examples, and lots of practice. It's easy.

> As Intel offers an HLL version of every Pentium instruction I
> have an interest in incorporating same as part of a
> specification language, eliminating the need to separately
> learn and write symbolic assembly language. I have a second
> interest in determining the reasons, if any, that an assembly
> language programmer can more efficient code than possible
> within the code generation phase of an HLL.
>
> It all gets back to having a software tool do what you want it
> to do in the most efficient and effective way possible. You
> have Michael Abrash in his "Zen of Assembly Language" going
> through the process of understanding the architecture of a
> processor relative to its instruction set, determining for a
> given function the most efficient set of instructions in terms of
> performance, and then once determined incorporating that
> within the code generation phase of an HLL.

I doubt if it's worth the trouble.. an HLL is mathematical notation and a
processor is a machine (sort of a nano-abacus) with some parts that don't
match up cleanly to any HLL. C comes close (it's basically a terse and
generic assembler). I have a hunch that it'd be simpler to use a little
assembly here and there rather than some super-HLL.

Maybe the best use of assembly is in writing special-purpose compilers for
things like pattern matching, for the fastest possible execution with the
least amount of code.

Tom Novelli

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