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>Most people think of assembly language as a low-level language. Turbo Assembler, however, provides many of the features of a high-level language (such as abstr

by pfoof 4y ago

>Most people think of assembly language as a low-level language. Turbo Assembler, however, provides many of the features of a high-level language (such as abstract data types, and easy interfacing to other languages). The addition of object-oriented data structures gives Turbo Assembler the power to create object-oriented programs as easily as high-level languages while retaining- the speed and flexibility of assembly language. Shocking and surprising

dools 4y ago
I actually found something similar in PIC micro controller assembly at uni. The way library loading worked allowed something very similar to object orientation in a super fast assembly language. My team wrote our 3rd year project in assembly and found that we experienced far fewer WTF moments and unexpected behaviours than all the other teams who chose to use C.
- pfoof 4y ago
  Similar to my uni project to make a concurrent server. Most people struggled to make it work with Java, and there were extra points for implementation of the project in C. So I did. Pthreads, zero deadlocks and zero memory leaks.
zwieback 4y ago
I remember coming across that - we mostly used MASM back in the day but when I found the object-oriented TASM stuff I was very tempted. Didn't really make a whole lot of sense since C++ is already pretty low-level, especially back in the 90s. The other interesting Borland OO thing was the C++ language extension for OWL (Object Windows Library, an early C++ GUI lib for WIndows) to link windows messages to member functions. It was addictively productive, when we switched over to MFC later on it felt like a step back.
mistrial9 4y ago
I wrote C code with dispatch tables to implement "virtual functions" for structs with method calls .. those were local to a dot-c file, with corresponding external dot-h interfaces defined.. all of that by my own design, for a framework for graphics programming .. in the early 90s. The techniques were known, just not common. Borland had great products, and was killed by "bloody means", by MSFT, in public view.

by pfoof 4y ago

dools 4y ago

I actually found something similar in PIC micro controller assembly at uni. The way library loading worked allowed something very similar to object orientation in a super fast assembly language. My team wrote our 3rd year project in assembly and found that we experienced far fewer WTF moments and unexpected behaviours than all the other teams who chose to use C.

pfoof 4y ago
Similar to my uni project to make a concurrent server. Most people struggled to make it work with Java, and there were extra points for implementation of the project in C. So I did. Pthreads, zero deadlocks and zero memory leaks.

zwieback 4y ago

I remember coming across that - we mostly used MASM back in the day but when I found the object-oriented TASM stuff I was very tempted. Didn't really make a whole lot of sense since C++ is already pretty low-level, especially back in the 90s. The other interesting Borland OO thing was the C++ language extension for OWL (Object Windows Library, an early C++ GUI lib for WIndows) to link windows messages to member functions. It was addictively productive, when we switched over to MFC later on it felt like a step back.

mistrial9 4y ago

I wrote C code with dispatch tables to implement "virtual functions" for structs with method calls .. those were local to a dot-c file, with corresponding external dot-h interfaces defined.. all of that by my own design, for a framework for graphics programming .. in the early 90s. The techniques were known, just not common. Borland had great products, and was killed by "bloody means", by MSFT, in public view.