3 ms·

How many HNers do you think know x86 assembly so well that simply seeing the structure of the code gives away the answer? :)

• jacquesm 16y ago
  Even if you didn't know x86 at all you should still be able to figure out what it does by looking at it given the fact that the specification of what it does is only one sentence long.
  • jemfinch 16y ago
    No doubt, but if my desire is not to see other answers, I'm not going to read the assembly closely enough to understand. Your objection makes more sense with indented programming languages whose indentation structure may give away more information.
    • axod 16y ago
      It's 8 instructions. It's a single loop. It's moving stuff from one buffer to another and ignoring specific bytes. What are you talking about? What's to understand?
      • jemfinch 16y ago
        I can ignore x86 assembly just like I can ignore French: the graphical structure (i.e., indentation) of an x86 program gives away nothing, just like a paragraph of French gives me no immediate sense of its meaning. In either case, I could probably puzzle out the meaning with intense reading, but the mere presence of the text does not give it away. My C solution, on the other hand, has a distinct graphical structure which would indicate, even to people for whom C isn't their "native language," a lot of the meaning of the text with merely a glance.