Right toolf for the job (Was: teaching programming to kids

________________________________ From: Chuck Guzis <cclist at sydex.com> To: General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts <cctalk at classiccmp.org> Sent: Wednesday, January 4, 2012 9:01 PM Subject: Re: Right toolf for the job (Was: teaching programming to kids On 4 Jan 2012 at 19:41, David Riley wrote: Well, even in the limited resource 8-bit days in the 70s, it didn't make sense to write a compiler in assembler, even when you were using assembler to write the code. C: It should also be pointed out that any assembly code is going to have to be optimized anyway (usually by hand). A good assembler programmer can write efficient assembly code. But any s/w that worth it's salt likely went through many iterations of testing (for speed usually) and rewriting. My assembler instructor (who didn't know what the 8088 Trap flag was for, I respectfully kept my mouth shut, a break from the usual) told the story of some guy who wanted to play chess on some embedded machine (sounds funky I know). He got everything in the allotted memory space, but one byte. He eventually had to go over the whole shebang to fit. It was tight to begin with, but had to be just a wee bit tighter.