[ubuntu-uk] Anyone here into low-level stuff?

[Tan, Xuan]

Agree with Matthew.

I've been coding for years now (most often in that piece of **** called VBScript for ASP pages), but only just started a proper course, which goes all the way from machine code to PIC to ARM to Pascal.

It's given me much more insight as to what I've been doing all this time.

XuanYou Tan

-----Original Message-----
From: ubuntu-uk-bounces at lists.ubuntu.com on behalf of Matthew Wild
Sent: Thu 4/17/2008 10:51 PM
To: British Ubuntu Talk
Subject: Re: [ubuntu-uk] Anyone here into low-level stuff?
 
On Thu, Apr 17, 2008 at 10:37 PM, Andrew Oakley <andrew at aoakley.com> wrote:
>
> James Grabham wrote:
>  > OK, so a couple of nights ago, someone from my LUG gave me a few old-ish
>  > books ('90s), anyway, theres a beginers guide to Assembly Language
>  > there.  I started reading, and the first 3 chapters are just about
>  > Computer Science, and It's really interesting, Im learning about octal
>  > and hex, and other maths stuff as well.  Id always though low-level
>  > stuff would be really boring...  guess I was wrong.

Very wrong :)

>
>  I officially retired from machine code when they switched from 8-bit to
>  16-bit. With 8-bit, I could actually memorise then entire 6502
>  instruction set in my head, by the numbers (eg. 96 = return from
>  subroutine). With 16-bit, it was just far too complicated for the whole
>  thing to stick in my head in one go!
>
>  Low-level stuff is really interesting, but the problem is these days
>  everything is built library on top of another (eg. X-Windows, Gnome)
>  that it is almost impossible to achieve anything in machine code.
>

Ah, but I believe just knowing it helps you in all areas of computing.
It gives you a feel for the basics, and leads to the guilty conscience
when using strcmp() in C :)

That said, assembly is still used often enough to optimise routines,
in games, or other performance-critical code, I don't believe there is
no longer a place for it.

Matthew.

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