John Rumm wrote:
On 26/10/2011 10:47, Huge wrote:
On 2011-10-26, John wrote:
On 26/10/2011 02:05, Jules Richardson wrote:
On Wed, 26 Oct 2011 01:46:55 +0100, John Rumm wrote:
AFAICS there wasn't much in it.
I wrote in 8086 assembler for the 8086 board I designed. It wasn't
any
more difficult than assembler for the 68000.

You are having a laugh...

I actually assumed he was just trolling, because surely even he isn't
*that* crazy.

x86 was awful, it really was. Didn't its choice largely stem from IBM

Was? it still is (from a developers point of view).

The good news is that I haven't written any assembler since the PDP11,
and
when I looked at the '86 out of idle curiousity, it made me nauseous.

Well to be fair, its exceedingly rare that one needs to dabble with
assembler... Only had to do it once seriously on '386 stuff and that was
for built in test code on a 386 platform when there were no compilers
capable of generating protected mode code available for it at the time!


Thats because grunts like me had written all te hardware BIOS code for
you :-)

Used to routinely do comms stuff in 8086 assembler when writing the main
app in Turbo Pascal 3[1] - but that was because the language at that
version lacked the ability to do interrupt handling etc. Once version 4
or 5 became available that was no longer needed.


Probably the worst systems programming language I have ever been exposed
to, pascal.

[1] Ah, the fond memories, an astoundingly fast and good compiler,
editor, and run time environment that all fitted in 50K on a floppy!

The number of times I have actually needed to code in assembler for
performance reasons, can probably be counted on two fingers in the last
twenty years! Once was the bitstream coding stuff on a system with very
tight and had real time limits. The other was for a Win 3.1 device
driver that let you do synch serial comms with no extra hardware on a
bog standard PC!

Writing a Pre-emptive multitasking kernel to slide under DOS2.2 was
probably the last one I did..what a horrible thing to have to do. There
was one bug I couldn't get rid of. Some things you might be doing on te
PC would crash it

But since that happened fairly often with DOS2.2 it wasn't a practical
issue.




These days the horror of the '86 is hidden away several layers below.
Hell,

Indeed.

Agreed.


Still handy now and then to be able to drop a debugger into disassembly
mode and look at what is *really* going on though! ;-)


So rare as to be a complete tribute to modern compilers. I used to do
it all the time to see what a mess they had made of the C code..Eraly C
cross compilers were frankly, ****e.

Mark Williams, Digital Research, BDS, Introl.. not one of them was
anything like intelligent.