John Rumm writes:

On 10/03/2012 17:48, Jules Richardson wrote:
On Sat, 10 Mar 2012 13:33:46 +0000, John Rumm wrote:
;-) Rather like talking with IMB mid range / mainframe types who seem
convinced that Assembler (note the capital A!) can only be known to
hallowed IBM programmers, and can't seem to get their heads round the
fact that every processor has a low level assembly language...

Every? Depends on the definition of assembly language, I suppose - is it
the binary opcodes which form CPU instructions, or is it the human-
readable mnemonics which correspond to those opcodes?

The latter...

I usually think of assembly language as the latter (that being what
people program at the low level using), but I suppose it's entirely
possible to have a CPU where there are no official published mnemonics
and instead things are documented in a more long-winded "binary opcode xx
performs operation yy" form.

I find it hard to imaging how you would document a processor instruction
set without in the process creating its assembly language as a result...
I suppose you could describe every instruction longhand, but I can't
imagine it would be long before some one comes along and creates
mnemonics for each.

ISTR some sort of 8 bit CPU (? Z80 ?) whose documentation included a
description in BNF.


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