Re: MASM documentation

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When MASM was developed, computers barely existed. We had to walk barefoot through the
snow to get our listings...
joe

On Sat, 14 Nov 2009 13:41:15 +0100, "Giovanni Dicanio"
<giovanniDOTdicanio@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

"Joseph M. Newcomer" <newcomer@xxxxxxxxxxxx> ha scritto nel messaggio
news:mebsf590t5c7h1q5ugnnobdnb0024i8udj@xxxxxxxxxx

It is surprising how horribly bad the documentation is.
MASM doesn't support Unicode, and I even have a slide that points this
out; it has to be

hello DB 'H', 00h, 'E', 00h, 'L', 00h, 'L', 00h, 'O', 00h, 00h, 00h

I can see why companies are having problems finding people who can program
in assembler.
When you can't learn how something works, you won't use it.

Probably when MASM was developed Unicode did not exist?
(I've never used this MASM, I don't know. I just used Devpac Assembler for
Motorola MC68000 on Commodore Amiga).


But now they're paying the price: people who need super-high-performance
and want to use
the fancy MMX/XMM/etc instructions can't figure out how to use them or
write them;

I have no idea of the assembly of the new Intel CPUs, but I read somewhere
that writing *hand-coded* optimized assembly code is hard these days (it's
not like the age of 80286 or Motorola 68000), and optimizing C++ compilers
do a better job than humans in producing optimized assembly code.


The number of us who used to earn our livings
writing huge systems in assembly code (250K lines) is dwindling...

Wow... Writing 250K lines of assembly code must be a titanic work (leaving
apart debugging...!).


I don't really believe in writing more that tiny subroutines in assembler,
but what I seem
to take for granted--how to write assembly code--is apparently becoming a
lost art.

As is COM programming :)


I thought writing a course in using MASM would be easy. It probably would
be, if there
were any documentation. Right now, I have to run experiments.

Have fun :)


Giovanni

Joseph M. Newcomer [MVP]
email: newcomer@xxxxxxxxxxxx
Web: http://www.flounder.com
MVP Tips: http://www.flounder.com/mvp_tips.htm
.

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