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

[CoCo Demus]

Disassemblers cannot disasm jump tables like the ones used in OS-9
co-modules. Also, to distinguish data embedded in the middle of the code
machine code knowledge is useful.



On Mon, Jul 10, 2017 at 4:59 PM, James Jones <jejones3141 at gmail.com> wrote:

> That's what disassemblers are for, save for programs that do tricks like
> modifying themselves.
>
> Were I teaching assembly language, I'd show the instruction formats, and
> then go into particular instructions as needed. Are you wondering whether
> the order of registers in the push/pull instructions makes a difference?
> Write assembly language that has them in different orders, and see whether
> the generated bytes for the two instructions as shown in the listing are
> the same. (If memory serves, they are.) About span-dependent instructions,
> I'd point out the different encodings and point interested students at the
> relevant paper from CACM back in the 70s, (The general problem is
> NP-complete, but there's an efficient algorithm that works for a family of
> displacements that includes all but the most pathological examples, and a
> good assembler ought to implement it.)
>
> James
>
> On Mon, Jul 10, 2017 at 12:38 PM, CoCo Demus <retrocanada76 at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
> > Machine language is mandatory when you are debugging or disassembling
> code
> >
> >
>
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