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Author Topic: Assembler (68k) help (about dc pseudo op)  (Read 25943 times)

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Offline Cymric

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Re: Assembler (68k) help (about dc pseudo op)
« on: January 16, 2003, 07:28:55 PM »
Quote
Jose wrote:
snip... I'm learning it cause from what I've always heard, migrating to ppc assembler is a breeze :-D


The question then of course is 'why would you want to code assembly?' Assembly is tough on a programmer because it has you doing everything yourself. Register allocation, memory management, pointer arithmetic. There are little semantic checks. Debugging can be a nightmare, especially if you're writing a demo. Code can be tough to document, and will span many, many lines. Nowadays, only experts (think Real Programmer Mel here) can produce consistently faster assembly code than that of an optimising compiler, and even then the differences are slim.

Of course, there's noone stopping you from learning assembly: by all means, go right ahead, enjoy! Splurge! Smell the bare metal! Bash that blitter! Coerce that Copper! Pounce at Paula :-)! Nevertheless, if you plan to do program development---and that includes demos---on the A1, my advice would be to forget it has a PPC, and just use C or BASIC or any other high(er) level language.
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Offline Cymric

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Re: Assembler (68k) help (about dc pseudo op)
« Reply #1 on: January 21, 2003, 07:03:03 PM »
Well, okay then. But make sure you do all the nasty stuff only assembly allows you do to. Like writing self-modifying code, or creating code that hooks into the illegal PC-exception vector to have 680x0-code execute at odd addresses. Or one of the many other particularly dirty things :-P.
Some people say that cats are sneaky, evil and cruel. True, and they have many other fine qualities as well.