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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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;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.

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