[Coco] Newbie stuff

[Gene Heskett]

On Saturday 17 January 2004 12:19, jimcox at miba51.com wrote:

[...]


>I'll check out Mix Software.  I take it you were talking
>abut the K & R book, when you commented about the
>developers.  I tried to read it once, and gave up.  Most C
>porgrammers I have spoken with have said to ONLY use it as
>a reference.

Thats a pretty good view of it.  It is the arguement settler, the 
ultimate syntax reference, but it is not, in any sense of anyones 
imagination, a tutorial.  It is simply the most clear, concise to the 
point that every word counts, C language reference manual ever.  Its 
shortcomeing, if it has one, is that its not always clear to the 
casual reader, what type of data the variables in the syntax 
statements refer to.  The eye automaticly flies to that line, 
skipping over half a paragraph of valuable data.  It really does make 
you back up the page to at least the start of that section and 
re-read it till you do understand.

>I need to stop wondering which path to take and just take
>one.  Been spending way too much time wondering what the
>right move was.  I have all the Assembly stuff I need, and
>enough C stuff to get me started once I get proficient at
>Assembly, so I think I have a course of action now.
> Cheers!
>
>Jim

Start with about 100k of working asssembly code, stuff you'll use 
every day, in however big a byte size fits the project contemplated.  
This may take only 3 or so bigger programs to do, or it may take 30 
little utils.

At the point where you feel comfortable with assembly, knowing that 
you can do anything you want to do in it, then you can switch to C, 
finally understanding that C is just a higher level of assembly 
language.  Compile the c srcs you write with the -a option, and look 
at the resultant assembly langauge output, and you will then have a 
much easier transition period, or you may wind up being fam enough 
with them all to just use the right language for the job out of the 
choices of asm, c, Basic09, or even (shudder) Pascal.

You can learn coding tricks from the compiler that way, or you can 
hand optimize the compilers output, and then complete the assembly 
and linking for more optimized code than either by itself.

One project I ran at the tv station for about 13 years (a profile 
memory manager for a GVG-300-3 a/b production video switcher, its 
"bag of tricks memory for this directors style") was originally 
started in basic09 with the intentions of going to os9 assembly if 
the B09 stuff wasn't fast enough.  But it was plenty fast enough to 
be 4x faster than Grass Valleys own $20,000 version of it so I left 
it in a language I could debug and/or modify easier, B09.

Developement time for the first working version of that app, was maybe 
5% of the time it would have taken me to do it in asm.  So in 
hindsight, I think I really did choose the right language for the 
job.

My $0.02, adjust its buying power for inflation though. :-)

-- 
Cheers, Gene
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty: soap,
ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
99.22% setiathome rank, not too shabby for a WV hillbilly
Yahoo.com attornies please note, additions to this message
by Gene Heskett are:
Copyright 2004 by Maurice Eugene Heskett, all rights reserved.