2 ms·

I feel it's mostly the problem of the first impression. My first encounter with assembly was x86 and so it didn't really bother me ("ah, so that's what it is, o

I feel it's mostly the problem of the first impression. My first encounter with assembly was x86 and so it didn't really bother me ("ah, so that's what it is, okay"), and other assemblies were felt to be basically the same, maybe marginally nicer, maybe marginally worse, but that's it. But I do imagine that if your first foray into assembly started with RISC-V, then looking at x86 would absolutely scare you. Then again, 6502 specs can probably fit on one sheet of paper too, just as MIPS32 did, and it too has been used in very productive and entertaining applications—and yet it's even more idiosyncratic than x86; I've seen considerably more examples of "an instruction that sets flags; anywhere from 1 to 10 instructions that don't set flags; conditional branch" pattern in 6502 code than in x86. I guess it's similar to learning functional vs. imperative programming language as your first intro to programming? P.S. AT&T syntax for x86 is a) backwards: "subl %eax, %ebx" vs "sub ebx, eax" for "ebx -= eax", ugh; b) pretends that numbers are weird functions: "subl -32(%ebx,%ecx,4), %eax" vs "sub eax, [ebx+ecx * 4-32]" for "eax -= MEMORY_AS_ARRAY_OF_INT32[ebx+ecx * 4-32]", what the hell, minus thirty two is most definitely not a function with three arguments; neither is it a three dimensional array if we pretend that parens stand for array indexing as they do in FORTRAN.

delta_p_delta_x 4y ago
> I feel it's mostly the problem of the first impression. That's fair. I started out with MIPS32. When I first saw x86 instructions, and a `mov`, my first thought was, 'what the heck? Where are the loads and stores? `mov rax, [rip + 32]` is 3 instructions in MIPS or any similar RISC, this looks weird.' > P.S. AT&T syntax for x86 is Oh, yeah, I hate it. x86 instructions can already get pretty long; now you have multiple suffixes just to account for size. The indexing operation is just ridiculous; Intel syntax makes it so much more straightforward.
xxs 4y ago
6502 has too many ways to address the memory (incl all the zero page), it will require quite a few pages not a single one. Indeed the lda/ldx/ldx change the flags unlikely 8086's mov. I learned 6502 assembly as a kid right after basic... and ever since always had enjoyed it. Pretty much until the compilers became better optimizing code than me (not the 6502 one, of course)

delta_p_delta_x 4y ago

> I feel it's mostly the problem of the first impression. That's fair. I started out with MIPS32. When I first saw x86 instructions, and a `mov`, my first thought was, 'what the heck? Where are the loads and stores? `mov rax, [rip + 32]` is 3 instructions in MIPS or any similar RISC, this looks weird.' > P.S. AT&T syntax for x86 is Oh, yeah, I hate it. x86 instructions can already get pretty long; now you have multiple suffixes just to account for size. The indexing operation is just ridiculous; Intel syntax makes it so much more straightforward.

xxs 4y ago

6502 has too many ways to address the memory (incl all the zero page), it will require quite a few pages not a single one. Indeed the lda/ldx/ldx change the flags unlikely 8086's mov. I learned 6502 assembly as a kid right after basic... and ever since always had enjoyed it. Pretty much until the compilers became better optimizing code than me (not the 6502 one, of course)