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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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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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