CompuServe Messages

Vic, Yes, interpreting 1s and 0s is exactly what it does, which is another way of saying what I did, that the machine runs 68000 machine code. I maintain though, that the closest human readable and interpretable representation of that machine code is assembler. It tells you _exactly_ what is happening, something that no higher level language can do. Lest you think that I am denigrating higher level languages or in some way diminishing their value, let me say that there is much validity in documenting in a higher level language. I just don't think that it's valid to document the OS itself that way, especially in light of the many and varied language preferences among programmers. You say that the biggest mistake was making it easy for assembly language interface, yet it relly isn't any more difficukt to push values onto a stack than it is to load them into registers when using assembly. I would be more inclined to agree with you if you stated that there are too many levels of overhead between the call itself and the actual routine, and called that the biggest mistake. I would be perfectly happy to push my values onto the stack, but would still wish to be spared the C syntax when working with assembler. Tell me what to set up, where to JSR to, and what to expect when control returns to my code. Let the C compiler people tell you the name of the routine, what arguments to pass, and what order to do it, likewise the Pascal/M2/LISP/FORTH/LOGO etc. compiler writers. How did the C fans feel about the Mac being documented in Pascal-like terms? How do the Modula-2 fans feel about the Amiga's C-like documentation. The bottom line is that the machine is documented the way it is due to an arbitrary decision, and that decision has increased the difficulty for more programmers than would have been the case if documented in "what is really happening". Regards, Larry.