Programming Like it was 1985!

[Thomas]

I am not interested in learning assembly as it would be impossible to take advantage of newer chip flags

Why do you think so ? Assember is translated into machine language as is C. So why should it be impossible to do something in assembler which you can do in C ?

Actually you can do even more in assembler than in C because assembler translates 1:1 into machine language while C has its fixed feature set which translates into only a subset of all available assembler/machine language instructions.

[Thomas]

I don't want to write programs that are architecture specific.

That's very welcome. But I am sure that in 1985 they didn't care.

Also I think if you start developing nice effects on let's say an AmigaOne with fast PPC processor and modern graphics card, the same program will be dead slow and stuttering on a classic Amiga. Nowhere near what they did in 1985.

[Thomas]

C is a very simple language. Critics even call it a collection of assembler macros. If you look at the assembler output of a C compiler you'll see that this is almost true. And C does not have a runtime environment. That makes C programs as small as assembler programs (if you avoid static link libraries).

Of course you can write blown-up programs in C, but you can do this in assembler, too. It's just more work. And you can write very efficient programs in C, almost as efficient as you can in assembler. As you said, the C compiler creates better assembler than you do. So why do you think that C programs have to be bigger than assembler programs ?