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naraburns  nihil supernum  2yr ago (text post)   31473 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 7, 2022

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C simplifies the construction of loops (which seem horrible in assembly)

This isn't hugely relevant to your point, but loops really aren't that bad in assembly. Basic for loop from 0-100 in assembly will be something like:

mov rcx, 0 ; set counter to 0

mov rax, 100 ; target number

.loop:

; whatever you want to do in your loop goes here

inc rcx ; counter += 1

cmp rcx, rax

jne .loop ; with above line, compare the counter to the target and loop if the target isn't reached

That really isn't particularly bad, though certainly not quite as nice as C or another higher-level language.

;whatever you want to do in your loop goes here

^ Is doing all the heavy lifting of "isn't particularly bad".

Nah, not really. Sure, whatever you put in the loop body will certainly be more verbose and harder to write than if you wrote it in C. But that isn't relevant to the notion that loops are hard to write in and of themselves in assembly. That's why I didn't include anything inside the loop, to show that the loop itself isn't hard to write.

Now, if we're saying assembly in general is harder to write? I will totally agree. I wouldn't go so far as to say it's super horrible or anything, but it is harder for sure. There is a reason we invented higher level languages. My point here was simply that loops are not particularly bad.

Maybe loops were a bad example. To be fair, I never wrote anything more than the bare minimum in assembly. I don't have deep knowledge of it and went for the first thing I could think of. The main point was C provides a bunch of niceties on top of assembly. And Python provides a lot of niceties over C. My mathematician peers would probably love to write their for loops in the style of for i,j,k ∈ +Z^3; i,j,k <= 10 { } which is a lot more abstract than loops in previous languages. Eventually it might become For all positive integer 3-tuples each value less than 10 { }. Heck maybe even For all the points in a cube with side length 10 { }. We lose some specificity, choosing which direction to iterate over first, but we are rewarded with reduced conceptual load.

Maybe what you mean is "assembly is bad at scopes" (in that the "whatever you want to do in your loop" has to remember which registers you've already used for other purposes outside of the loop; the same problem arises for procedure calls)?

Seems fair, but I agree with @SubstantialFrivolity that it's weird to characterize that as assembly being bad at loops. It's bad at naming. And getting the name of your complaint right is half the battle -- the other half is cache invalidation and the other half is off by one errors.

hey now

Our power (and income) relies on the kids trained on Java and Python viewing assembly as some sort of dark magic, I can't let you just hand out eldritch knowledge willy-nilly ;-)

The new programming literacy test: Write Fizzbuzz. In assembler. 6502 assembler. And it has to accept values up to 100,000. You may output a character by calling a subroutine at 0xFDED with the character in the accumulator, after which all register contents are lost.

(it will surprise nobody familiar with the subject that Fizzbuzz in 6502 can be found on the net)

6502 is one of the instruction sets that were actually kind of nice to write by hand, though. I guess you'd do something that amounts to keeping your loop counter mod 15 in the low 4 bits of X and then use the remaining 13 bits in X and Y plus some flag you don't touch to get to 100k? I'd rather do this exercise than MIPS or some nasty SIMD and/or RISC special-purpose core...

Yes, all the 8-bit processors were pretty easy to write for by hand; the trick is they don't have multiplication, division, or 24-bit numbers. (Most can do limited 16-bit arithmetic). Getting that right isn't hard but it probably requires you've done low-level work before.

MIPS isn't hard either, provided you just throw a no-op in the delay slot.

I'd rather use 68k which had a bit more to work with (and I still have a physical reference manual) and it had more consistent behavior rather than the fun quirks of 6502.

Yeah, the 68000 series was probably the peak of hand-writable assembly language. But it's a 32-bit processor with multiplication and division, way too easy.

While you're at it, mine your own silicon for the CPU.

PrimitiveTechnology has entered the chat.

Sorry, I didn't mean to let guild secrets out into the open like that.

Honestly I find it kind of depressing just how many of our new hires now seem to view even C and basic command line functions as eldritch knowledge. Like come on, what do you guys even do in school these days?

Given that I just spent two days dealing with Linux kernel driver conflicts even though that is obstensibly not my job I think you're right ;-)

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