3 ms·

My Uni had this weird notion of teaching assembly with made up processors. It was some professor's hobby to write emulators with a semi-graphical environment th

My Uni had this weird notion of teaching assembly with made up processors. It was some professor's hobby to write emulators with a semi-graphical environment that showed the registers, and so on. I didn't buy it. We should have used real processors or, at least, those fantasy processors should have been reflections of real ones. I thought then that we should have started with 8-bit processors. Anyway, later we had a chance to do some work with real 8086 assembly and that was a lot more exciting.

wink 5y ago
When I took the compiler course in university around 2004/05 we were using some Motorola CPU iirc, definitely old but real. I have to say I don't remember a lot, and the only difference between my theoretical knowledge before "how does assembly language roughly look, how is the control flow and how do you use it" (mostly from trying to understand cracks and binary patches for nagscreens) versus using it on a real (emulated) thing was pretty small. And most of all, I remember zero of the details now. So yeah, maybe it would have helped you if you actually had fun, but to me it didn't really make a difference, because even back then writing assembly for speed in a modern processor was already so different that it didn't matter for the basics.