Assembly
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!
Tags: Rants
May 31st, 2007 at 7:58 pm
Wow, you’re learning Assembly before C? In my undergrad we go C++ before anything else. [Not that I know that much of it].