Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!lll-tis!mordor!joyce!sri-unix!garth!smryan From: smryan@garth.UUCP (Steven Ryan) Newsgroups: comp.lang.c Subject: Re: using (ugh! yetch!) assembler Message-ID: <1258@garth.UUCP> Date: 18 Aug 88 21:25:36 GMT References: <8808160906.aa05339@SMOKE.BRL.MIL> Reply-To: smryan@garth.UUCP (Steven Ryan) Organization: INTERGRAPH (APD) -- Palo Alto, CA Lines: 27 >As Kernighan and Ritchie say in their recent article in Byte (I'm >paraphrasing), it's a tribute to C that there is so little assembler >programming being done by systems programmers today. If you've ever >had the "honor" of doing systems programming on a system that didn't >have C, you can really appreciate this. Well, I've done a few thousand lines of Compass (assembly) for my own programming environment. (Actually I'm not sure how much: three binders of doublesided laser printer listings.) I'm not sure if that constitutes system programming, because part of I did was build a multitasking executive between rest of my code and NOS. Oh, and I rewrote the I/O interface to handle various character sets, command line parsing, strange file structures (no EOR before EOI, as when SFM attaches the job dayfile). It was an honour. And alotta fun. Now I have the `honour' of learning C and Unix. And I thought Cybil and NOS 2 had problems. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Well, that was perhaps more bitchy than it really had to be. Just like Wirth does for his toys, K+R built their prejudices into C. I happen to disagree. That's fine. But I don't appreciate this waxing raptureously over some particular language and casting every other language into the Outer Darkness. Perhaps, I should go away if nobody wants to listen. Problem is I've got a bit of that old mad prophet.