[Coco] Linville's ramblings on assembly vs machine code

[Johann Klasek]

On Mon, Jul 10, 2017 at 03:24:42AM -0500, RETRO Innovations wrote:
> On 7/10/2017 1:20 AM, Dave Philipsen wrote:
> >Ok, so the list seems rather quiet so I'll try to stir the pot a bit 
> >here.  On the CoCo Crew Podcast John Linville rambled on for about 
> >nine minutes telling us how machine code is essentially the same as 
> >assembler and there's no reason to even try to learn it as it's simply 
> >a different (and more difficult) way of 'saying' the same thing.
> I was surprised it merited a segment on the show.  The attempt to show 
> the debate "a distinction without a difference" seemed itself "a 
> distinction without a difference" :-).
> 
> I know quite a few developers, and I've never heard of this debate. I 
> think developers do make a distinction between ML and ASM, because there 
> are times, as you note, when you're not in front of an assembler, and 
> you need to make changes.  And, there are times when knowing how the 
> code will assemble into opcodes allows finer control over the resulting 
> program.  So, to distinguish the two ways of looking at the code, we use 
> ML and ASM.

I do also prefer this kind of view. The abstraction level makes the
difference. For most of my assembly coding a more or less strong look at
cpu cycles and opcode size is an automatically task even if not
mandatory. It serves effiency (in time and/or space), elegance and
generally programming skills on how to do the assembly coding if one
does really know how the produced code appears in memory AKA in ML
(in the same way as one has to know exactly how an instruction is
executed).


Johann K.