Daryl Teo

Part of my current course requires me to learn Assembler, which is basically the 2nd most basic level of coding (after Machine Code). Gone are the luxuries of parameter passing, return values, classes and primitive methods, and your best friends are Bytes, subroutines, and branches.

As I do more and more of it however, the more I begin to appreciate how much high level languages do for us. Things like control structures (for, while loops), conditionals (if, switch), and other simple methods like getting the length of a string are all tedious coding tasks in Assembler (getting the length of a string in Assembler would require some 10-20 lines!). Things that may seem simple enough in high level languages(like parameter passing) require fiddling with stack pointers, and memory allocation. Now that I think of it, learning C should be a walk in the park compared to learning Assembler (And I plan to do that soon enough)

So next time you pass parameters to a function, or declare a variable, just remember… things could be much much much harder!

Yes I am well and truely alive. Still settling into life here in Melbourne, applying for jobs (and not getting them, not surprisingly), and concentrating on studies. Meanwhile, Flash CS3 has launched, and I don’t have enough money to get it. What a bummer. Also, Patrick Mineault of AMFPHP has announced he has retired from the project. Aral Balkan releases a new solution that could possibly replace AMFPHP.

So what are my plans now? Uni definately comes first. I have a couple of game ideas I want to realise, and I also run a course-notes site for my course. Portfolio, and site are also on the list. And a job.

But hopefully I will get back into the groove of blogging (and also have things to blog about!). See you guys around!