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FPC for DOS / FreeDOS (DOSX)

posted by marcov, 12.04.2008, 13:27

> You're obviously on the
> latter side,

That's a horribly biassed assumption. Everybody that doesn't agree with you, of course can't think for himself, and just goes with the flow.

And of course I'm sparring a bit for fun, and exaggerating the parallels (the desert example). But the point of this is to separate actual, valid reasons from "we are a little minority that is always right" principle. The smaller the minority, the more extreme the opinions.

> but be warned: you're in a DOS forum, where some participants
> might believe that "the majority is always wrong" (or, more popular, that
> "one million flies might be wrong when sitting on a pile of sh*t").
Well, stuff me in a third category, since I have programmed assembler for a living. And still am in contact with others that do. Some even fulltime, and not on the side like I did. (our microcontroller is only for support of the PC).

However if you ask them, they have very sane reasons, and can back this up by actual facts. _ALL_ of them have the same application also in a HLL btw.

> so to choose ASM intentionally as
> implementation language might sound absolutely unreasonable for you - size
> and speed usually don't matter.
Correct. However what worries me more in these kinds of discussions is the failure to come up with any sane reasons. Everybody talks about "embedded", but if you ask further, it turns out they use yesteryears PC, which were never embedded in the first place.

> However, I'm doing just this, and I'm neither a masochist nor
> unreasonable.

Well, a lot of loons don't realise that they are. But ok, let's have your reasons. Even "it is just a hobby, and I like the puzzle aspect" is a better reason that what I have heard thus far.

> There are some advantages of HLLs compared to ASM, portability is the most
> important one, but very often portability isn't an issue at all, and to a
> large degree portability is - as far as HLLs are concerned - a "myth" with
> few relation to reality.
Well, at least we agree on that. The portability _is_ important, but not blackwhite over the border of a HLL/asm border.

> *((dir_node *)dir->sym)->e.constinfo->is_this_true = FALSE;
>
> fortunately aren't possibly in ASM and therefore ASM hasn't the bad
> "write-only" image like some HLLs.
Well, that is for me one of the fundamental reasons. And then I don't mean the above mess per se, but the ability to abstract a datatype from its memory layout, and in general the syntax check of the compiler.

I know, you can give fields of records an offset, you can workaround some stuff with macro systems that systematically get more complex (though that is not strictly assembler anymore), and in fact C's history is much in the same space (some of the C predecessors were closer to a complex macro assembler than to C). You can even do a bit of a kind of "assembler lint" to detect often made flaws.

But it remain workarounds, and the processing program (the assembler/compiler) has way less information to work with (and to check things) in the assembler case then in the compiler case. And that already assumes you plugged the other defects.

Moreover, C is known as the assembler of HLLs. So you comparing already to rock bottom.

> Even more, ASM programmers tend to add comments in their source, a habit
> which many C (and Pascal?) programmers seem to ignore - possibly because
> they're believing their language is "self-documenting"?
Depends. In general, people still doing asm are doing that for a very specifical reason, and they (or their boss) are typically not paid directly in proportion to their output, like e.g. a contract programmer.

In those kinds of niches, people can do pretty much anything they want, not hampered by any competition (since not assembler, but their often long experience with the company is the main factor).

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