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If you want to teach concepts and make it easier to understand and complete assignments, then yes, 16-bit assembly is fine. Much easier than both modern x86 an
by Const-me 10y ago
If you want to teach concepts and make it easier to understand and complete assignments, then yes, 16-bit assembly is fine.
Much easier than both modern x86 and amd64 instruction sets.
IMO modern x86 CPUs are not designed for humans. For example, x87 FPU is deprecated, by default no modern compiler emits those instructions because SSE2 is typically faster even for scalar values. While making compiled programs faster, it also makes reading and writing floating-point assembler code harder compared to the legacy x86.
> every amd64 machine can run 16- or 32-bit x86 machine code
Only when running on bare metal. Modern operating systems restrict which code you can run on them. For example, in Windows 64, in kernel mode you can’t even use x87 FPU instruction set.