A Conversation for Assembly Language

Maintenance

Post 1

Is mise Duncan

Assembly language is an absolute PITA to maintain. Give me a decent OO HLL any day.

Often the comments (if there are any at all) are along the lines of what you have "Add 1 to register".

Imagine trying to debug that kind of program...
*shivers*


Maintenance

Post 2

DrRodge

Comments are as important as the code whatever language you are using, especially if someone else has to maintain it or if you have to refer to it years later.

I had the misfortune to see the, Microsoft written, source code they contributed to IBM's OS/2 operating system. In 20,000 lines of code there was just one comment: "weird shit". Says it all really!

On the subject of various languages, try writing a "Hello World" program in each to run under PCDOS. Then compare program sizes. Try the same, but to run under windoze. Finally, what is the smallest program, in bytes - not source code, that can be written to display "Hello World" on a PC monitor?


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