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> The downside of this decision would mean that I would sacrifice having syntax highlighting for 6510 assembly language, and I would be stuck starting at black
by spc476 8y ago
> The downside of this decision would mean that I would sacrifice having syntax highlighting for 6510 assembly language, and I would be stuck starting at black text on a white background. Not exactly consistent with the “right tool” statement I just made.
Perhaps this is a "get off my lawn" moment for me, but really? You can't deal with a text editor sans syntax highlighting? For 6510 assembly language? It's nothing more than four columns of
label opcode operand comment
label opcode operand comment
Kids today (now I have to adjust the onion in my belt).
- pjmlp 8y agoI have used syntax highlighting since Turbo Pascal 1.5 for Windows 3.x/Turbo Pascal 7.0 for MS-DOS. So even around 30 years ago it was already a thing.
- pmiller2 8y agoI think the point is that 6510 ASM is so simple one shouldn’t need syntax highlighting, because there’s almost no syntax.
- pjmlp 8y agoWell, I still find it conformable to be able to quickly distinguish between comments, labels, mnemonics, macros, strings and numbers. TASM with Turbo Vision based IDE, yay!
- _the_inflator 8y agoBack in the day this was ok. Look at actual stuff and you see that it is all cross development, macros etc. Visually structuring your code helps a lot focussing on the hard parts. It is about getting all the need you can get, not settling for less. ;)
- setquk 8y agoIndeed. I will be called lazy here but I just use the default vi or vim install on a Linux / Unix box usually and live with it. It turns to my advantage when I am suddenly on a box without all the usual desk toys available. Just sit down and do work. No adjusting the curtains first. Plus things like vim autoindent just don’t work very well on yaml etc and get me annoyed. This came from an event in about 1998 where I was stuck on an airgapped sunos box for 3 months.
- egypturnash 8y agoSo if you take a look at the screen grab of that -https://operation8bit.files.wordpress.com/2018/10/feature_syntax.png https://operation8bit.files.wordpress.com/2018/10/feature_sy... - you will notice that he’s highlighting an assortment of assembler directives with colors far away from the opcodes, and that there’s a jsr highlighted in red. Presumably jmp is also picked out: HEY THE PROGRAM FLOW CHANGES HERE. Feels pretty useful for skimming the code a few days later when you’ve forgotten the details. Or for commenting and cleaning up a disassembly of someone else’s code, I remember drawing lines on printouts to try and unwind what was happening... Also of course if you are going to do something insane like build a completely automated workflow to go from “a file full of assembly” to “a browser window opens with an emulated c64 running your code” in one keystroke, you may as well fuck around with writing a syntax highlighter while you’re at it.
- lowercased 8y agowhoah - you had comments?
- ungzd 8y agoI don't think usefullness of syntax highlighting depends on complexity of syntax. It's useful not because it's hard to distinguish between e.g. builtin operator vs function call, but for some subconscious visual clues and making wall of text less uniform. For assembly it might be even more useful because otherwise code may look like solid column of text. AFAIK, there's no theory why syntax highlighting is useful. There's movement against it, one of famous proponents against syntax highlighting is Rob Pike, with his Acme editor. However, most people still prefer having highlighting enabled.