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> "That is, C is little more than a portable assembly language." I know it's not really the point, but this is a pet peeve. No, C is nothing like assembly lan
by wheels 15y ago
> "That is, C is little more than a portable assembly language."
I know it's not really the point, but this is a pet peeve. No, C is nothing like assembly language. I seriously question whether anyone who repeats that frequently has actually done any assembly programming. It's an order of magnitude more tedious than writing C.
- jdc 15y agoYou probably didn't mean any harm, but these "well, actually" comments are doing serious damage to HN usefulness and atmosphere.
- paulhauggis 15y agoright. We need to stay with the grain and not express our differing opinions.
- jdc 15y agoIf the opinion in question is a technical quibble that does nothing to further the discussion at hand, then we're in agreement.
- apenwarr 15y ago"Back in the day", pre-RISC, with fancy macro assemblers (like Turbo Assembler), programming in assembly was actually not that bad. C is obviously better, but not actually as much better as people seem to think. Nowadays life would be a lot worse in assembler, because CPUs are designed to be programmed mostly by compilers, not humans. (Also, the ways in which C is better than assembly roughly correspond to the ways in which our query language would be better than SQL. Like, say, variable scoping.)
- huhtenberg 15y agoOne of the best assembler IDE was Turbo Pascal 6.0. One would write begin/end, stick asm block in the middle and the rest will be in assembly. Full debugger support too, it was very convenient.
- apu 15y agoIt's a relative thing -- wouldn't you agree that C is closer to assembly than it is to, e.g., lisp?