#Asm. vs. HLL
2 messages in this thread
If Joe Sr. Software Dude is truly making $25/hr., then he most likely wouldn't
have to go back and re-tweak; the tweaking would have been done while he was
writing his code, using everything he had learned in his xx years of
experience. If he does happen to come up 9 words short, it'd be much easier for
him to go back and find an extra nine words of assembler code that he wrote,
than for some one expert at HLL but not so great at assembler who has an
optimizing compiler to reverse assemble the code (or tell the compiler to
produce an assembler listing), try to figure out how it accomplishes what the
HLL said to do, plus find some way of doing it better that the guy who wrote
the optimization code, who supposedly knew what he was doing (though that's not
always guaranteed). <Boy, that was a run-on sentence – I hope everyone could
follow it, I almost couldn't :^) > The point is, there are applications where
coding in assembler is a must vs. a high-level language like C, and there
always will be.
Harry,
Amen to that! We've come full circle. My original contention was that assembly
is great when timing/sizing are critical, but when schedule and maintianability
are the prime drivers HLL is usually more cost effective. And thats not just my
opinion, there are many studies to support that and in fact that was one of the
drivers in the military's desision to require Ada for embedded systems.
(However, they could use some good assembler guys to to tweak on the compilers
for PC base Ada systems!!)
BTW, you'd be supprised how many of those $25 /hr programmers know only one
language, say all others are S–t and refuse to code in them!! (Real
programmers can learn and will not be afraid to use ANY language the situation
requires.)
Again, realize I'm speaking from real-time areospace systems. I've never done
commercial or business or database type stuff which I should have mentined at
the start of this. And typically software people ar brought on last after all
the hardware types have had there "aw just do it in software" designs frozen
and the project needs thousands of line of code done yesterday.
wmc