3 ms·

What does "manually compiled to assembler" even mean? How is that different from "rewriting it in assembler"?

• effish 8y ago
  There is a gray area there. But we are talking about translating an existing model program and algorithms, not looking at the program as a black box and recreating its behavior. As the person who translated the Pascal Logo model to TI9900 assembler it was definitely the case that at the beginning of the project I translated every line of Pascal to a few instructions of assembler. By the end I was just looking at the gist of what a routine would do (its “contract” as they say) and writing it in assembler as you would new code. It’s much like translating a literary work. There’s a famous quotation (which I’m not comfortable relating in full) about translations being either faithful or beautiful but not both. Essentially maybe I became a fluent native speaker of 9900 assembler.