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> but it also bears mentioning that assembly and English are different languages. In particular, the way objects and verbs interact is different The mnemonic o
by rdtsc 4y ago
> but it also bears mentioning that assembly and English are different languages. In particular, the way objects and verbs interact is different
The mnemonic operation names are in English though. mov = move, add = add, jmp = jump etc. It's not like it's just hex codes, APL or K. So I think the English argument kind of makes sense.
> It’s somewhat telling that assembly has no equivalent to the word ‘to’, and few enough production rules to count on both hands.
Assembly was designed to be fairly concise. Blaming a 1970s assembly syntax for not having "to" instead of a comma is kind of silly. It used commas and will keep using them probably. If the syntax was more advanced, it wouldn't be assembly, it would be C or some other higher level language.
- fsckboy 4y agoand to take this in the other direction, TFA> The association between this numeric form and its meaning under the ISA is completely arbitrary P> It's not like it's just hex codes The numeric form of machine code, appropriately in hex or octal, is not arBITrary at all, the bits mean things that help group and decode the instruction with minimal logic. In the first example in the article, it's easy to see the registers he's talking about, and it would be easy after that to decode the addressing modes, alu functions, etc.
- rdtsc 4y agoBut they are not listing the hex codes but the mnemonic commands which look strangely enough similar to English, wouldn't you agree? "mov", "jmp", "rdtsc" etc.
- fsckboy 4y agoTFA shows a numeric code in octal, but says that numeric codes are arbitrary. Why should they list arbitrary codes? They're not arbitrary, was my point.