mercury@ut-ngp.UUCP (Larry E. Baker) (04/17/85)
[excerpted from this month's Dr. Dobb's Journal, without permission]
From "16 Bit Software Toolbox"
(A letter from Gregor Owen, Port Jefferson Station, NY)
[a short description of the "Microsoft Assembler Bug of the
Month" ommitted]
"My personal theory about 8086/8088 assembly language is
that what we have here is a marketing coup on the part of
Intel. They had a ridiculous processor, with the
traditional inept Intel approach to registers and
addressing. Somehow, they sensed it would be awfully
embarrassing to expose this thing in all the stark
simplicity of their "lxi h,7" type assembler [for the 8080
among other processors]. So they commissioned the finest,
most convoluted, Pascalized minds in the software industry
to come up with an assembler so grand and structured and
incredibly intricate that no one would ever notice how awful
the thing was for which it was assembling. Judging by the
results, they seem to have succeded.
"And those of us who labor in the vineyards of the
information revolution can't be all too high-horsey about
this: after all, the Intel/Microsoft language makes it
almost impossible for those pesky amateurs to figure
anything out, thus preserving the world of 8086/88 assembler
for us, the elect: people paid to spend the necessary
endless hours figuring out how to use the language and avoid
the Microsoft bugs. A sort of `programmer's employment
project' for the new age."
For all the net.flamers who are wondering why this was posted: it
sounded an *awful* lot like a flame to me...
Aloha,
--
- Larry Baker @ The University of Texas at Austin
- ... {seismo!ut-sally | decvax!allegra | tektronix!ihnp4}!ut-ngp!mercury
- ... mercury@ut-ngp.ARPAgordonl@microsoft.UUCP (Gordon Letwin) (04/20/85)
A recent article attributed Microsoft with the design of the 8086/8088 assembly language. I would say that we're flattered, but I doubt that this was meant as a compliment. In any case, Intel designed both the processor and the assembly language. Microsoft's assembler simply duplicates the Intel assembler - opcodes, pseudos, formats, "typed" architecture, etc. I'm not a big fan of this style of assembler - I frequently discover that I had thought one thing and the assembler the other. I'd gladly give up the convenience of a "smart" assembler for the easier predictability of a dumb one. But, the essense of a programmer is to program ones self to interface with the tools at hand... gordon letwin microsoft