Art of Assembly Language:Forward
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The Wayback Machine - http://web.archive.org/web/20011226171528/http://cs.smith.edu:80/~thiebaut/ArtOfAssembly/fwd/fwd.html
The Art of Assembly Language
Forward Why Would Anyone Learn This Stuff?
1 What's Wrong With Assembly Language
2 What's Right With Assembly Language?
3 Organization of This Text and Pedagogical Concerns
4 Obtaining Program Source Listings and Other Materials in<br>This Text
Copyright 1996 by Randall Hyde
All rights reserved.
Duplication other than for immediate display through a browser is prohibited<br>by U.S. Copyright Law.
This material is provided on-line as a beta-test of this text. It is for<br>the personal use of the reader only. If you are interested in using this<br>material as part of a course, please contact
rhyde@cs.ucr.edu
Supporting software and other materials are available via anonymous ftp<br>from cs.ucr.edu.
See the "/pub/pc/ibmpc" directory for details.
Notes:
This document was prepared by cutting and pasting data from Framemaker 4<br>into PageMill or by using Quadralay's Webworks Publisher (this is not an<br>endorsement, btw). Since HTML does not support the rich formatting options<br>available in Framemaker, this document is only an approximation of the actual<br>chapter from the textbook.
This document does not contain the laboratory exercises, programming assignments,<br>exercises, or chapter summary. These portions were omitted for several reasons:<br>either they wouldn't format properly, they contained hyperlinks that were<br>too much work to resolve, they were under constant revision, or they were<br>not included for security reasons. Such omission should have very little<br>impact on the reader interested in learning this material or evaluating<br>this document.
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Comments, bug reports, ratings, etc., should be reported to the above email<br>address.
Forward Why Would Anyone Learn This Stuff?
Amazing! You're actually reading this. That puts you into one of three categories:<br>a student who is being forced to read this stuff for a class, someone who<br>picked up this book by accident (probably because you have yet to be indoctrinated<br>by the world at large), or one of the few who actually have an interest<br>in learning assembly language.
Egads. What kind of book begins this way? What kind of author would begin<br>the book with a forward like this one? Well, the truth is, I considered<br>putting this stuff into the first chapter since most people never bother<br>reading the forward. A discussion of what's right and what's wrong with<br>assembly language is very important and sticking it into a chapter might<br>encourage someone to read it. However, I quickly found that university students<br>can skip Chapter One as easily as they can skip a forward, so this stuff<br>wound up in a forward after all.
So why would anyone learn this stuff, anyway? Well, there are several reasons<br>which come to mind:
Your major requires a course in assembly language; i.e., you're here<br>against your will.<br>A programmer where you work quit. Most of the source code left behind<br>was written in assembly language and you were elected to maintain it.<br>Your boss has the audacity to insist that you write your code in assembly<br>against your strongest wishes.<br>Your programs run just a little too slow, or are a little too large<br>and you think assembly language might help you get your project under control.<br>You want to understand how computers actually work.<br>You're interested in learning how to write efficient code.<br>You want to try something new.
Well, whatever the reason you're here, welcome aboard. Let's take a look<br>at the subject you're about to study.
1 What's Wrong With Assembly Language
Assembly language has a pretty bad reputation. The common impression about<br>assembly language programmers today is that they are all hackers or misguided<br>individuals who need enlightenment. Here are the reasons people give for<br>not using assembly:
Assembly is hard to learn.<br>Assembly is hard to read and understand.<br>Assembly is hard to debug.<br>Assembly is hard to maintain.<br>Assembly is hard to write.<br>Assembly language programming is time consuming.<br>Improved compiler technology has eliminated the need for assembly language.<br>Today, machines are so fast that we no longer need to use assembly.<br>If you need more speed, you should use a better algorithm rather than<br>switch to assembly language.<br>Machines have so much memory today, saving space using assembly is...