Re: Need C++ tutor for 10th grade student

["Nicholas Bodley" <user=1375@nabble.blu.org>]

 On Thu, 14 Feb 2008 17:46:37 -0500, Mark J. Dulcey <[hidden email]>   
wrote: 

>  These days, very few people in the real world program in assembler, at   
> least outside the embedded design community. 

One company that's known* to probably everyone on BLU uses HLL (C++?) to   
write its flagship product. However, one young employee is fluent in (x86)   
assembler, and fixes bugs that stump everybody else. *Sorry; NDA... 

[...] 

> On the other hand, learning assembler gives you an understanding of how   
> computers really work that working in higher-level languages does not,   
> and it will continue to be important for embedded designers and   
> operating system designers for some time to come. I think that assembler   
> would make a great SECOND language to learn for the student who shows a   
> serious interest in computers and how they work. 

I'd expect that it would be difficult at best to obtain anything like   
logic diagrams of recent 8-bit CPUS, and impossible for those with longer   
word lengths. Design docs for current CPUs surely don't have logic   
diagrams on paper! 

Being a professional codger, I was very lucky some decades ago to be   
taught right from the ground up -- binary, circuits, logic, and low-level   
programming. One really knows how a computer of that era worked! It was   
rather expected that binary numbers and logic were not difficult, but   
extremely different in several ways from one's usual experience. 
Until then, I'd been as mystified as almost anyone else how computers   
worked. Once it had been (beautifully) explained, I realized (with   
newly-taught background) that they are not exotic and mysterious; basics   
are rather simple*. What is significant, though, is that the ideas are   
very clever and (at one time) very innovative, very different in many   
ways. *or were, then, before it became possible to do the likes of branch   
prediction, speculative and out-of-order execution, instruction   
reordering, etc. 

-- 
Nicholas Bodley 
Waltham, Mass. 
who's still mad at Intel marketing for removing 
hardware features first found in 386s 

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