"Nobody programs in machine language" (was: Modern Electronics(was

Bert> Fred Cisin wrote: Bert> I'm not sure. I hate proprietary microsoft stuff, therefore my Bert> guess whould be no. Bert> That should be covered in another class: computer Bert> architecture. I think it would suffice if you only discussed Bert> intel, since that allows students to experiment with what they Bert> learned. Assembly languages are all so much related that if you Bert> learned one, you easily learn any other. At least that is my Bert> experience. If at all possible, teach assembly language on ANY machine OTHER than Intel. There's nothing within an order of magnitude as ugly, baroque, or bizarre as the x86 instruction set architecture; not even the IBM/360 comes close. Not only are RISC machines easy to implement, they are also easy to understand at an assembly language level. MIPS has just one crock (delay slots); Alpha is even better. Making any of them fly is another matter -- you can't do that with ANY contemporary machine until and unless you really understand how it schedules instructions. And for modern machines that takes quite a lot of study (for RISC as well as x86). But to get started on writing just *correct* assembler code, RISC is a breeze. Run Unix, it has a much simpler ABI. Or use a bare machine -- serial line output is trivial, certainly once you've initialized the UART. Interrupts? Sure, at some point. Not necessarily day 1. For one thing, embedded systems don't necessarily use interrupts. paul