i'm learning 68k but im gonna learn ARM after that

And whoever used the least instructions got bragging rights.

which computer

Oh, one that my professors used, I think it was created by a student a few years prior. Don't even remember the name.

It was your typical two operand instructions, 4-bit instructions.

interesting strategy. too obscure to cheat?

I guess so.

can i do your same assignment on 68k?

I don't see why not.

will it be easier then?

Probably.

I got bragging rights, by the way. Got my program to be even shorter than the professor's and the TAs' programs.

By using the instructions themselves as constants.

About 20% of the class couldn't make it fit in the 256 bytes.

what book did they give you for assembly

assembly is cancer

^you probly like java

^likes js

Another we had to do was long division. Actually, now that I'm thinking about it, the 4-bit instructions one was to program long division. The architecture didn't have division. The normalization one was on an 8-bit instructions architecture. Same 256 bytes limit for both.

well you've already said assembly is cancer twice. yet your computer needs it to run, js or no?

We didn't get any book, the course was on computer architectures. We went through the design of various didactic architectures, then at the end some MIPS and IA-32.

if i wanna play with ARM i should buy an rPi??

There are plenty of ARM devices.

yeah but its mainstream, deployable, versatile, so it's a good starting point?

yee

By all means, learn some assembly, it'll do you some good. But you don't really write programs in assembly; at least not if you want to finish coding it any time soon.

Mainstream? Go for x86-64.

You should know what compiled code looks like, specially if you want to have any hope of debugging code properly.

Say, what a function call looks like.

What an array access looks like.

What a C string operation looks like.

What an `if` or a `for` look like.

But you don't really write any significant code in assembly. We have compilers for that; at which point the architecture is irrelevant - as long as the language is supported by the hardware vendor.

well i thought ARM asm was big for embedded systems

Dude, even NES games were made with compilers (or pseudo-compilers) back then.

Embedded devices these days have plenty of RAM and CPU.

When you program something for a raspberry pi, you do it in a high level language.

well what do arm asm dudes get paid for?

Usually people just run Linux on a raspberry pi, and thus they can use any language that runs on Linux + ARM.

also, as far as my reasearch i was under the impression that all or most 8/16bit console games were coded in assembly. But as I'm learning I see it's all about sweettalking the Assembler with macros to let you write human-readable code

What would often happen is, some essential routines would be written in ASM, and they would be glued with an "almost high-level language."