"Nobody programs in machine language",ReRe: "Who you callin Nobody?", ReReRe(...

David> 1) Reliability and Maintainability are more important than David> Memory/CPU Cycles these days. 2) Good Code or Bad code can be David> written in ANY environment. 3) Compilers are better than David> humans at doing things consistantly. (1) Reliability is always more important. But memory/CPU cycles cannot be ignored when your customers are running benchmarks, and when you're trying to beat the competition using less expensive hardware than they are. (2) Yes indeed -- but being skilled at assembly language programming imposes a useful discipline that carries over into other languages. (3) Not true. A compiler will beat a poor assembly programmer all the time, and an average one much of the time. But a programmer can know more about the problem than the compiler can ever know (because the higher level language can't express everything there is to say about the problem) so an excellent programmer can always tie the compiler, and in selected spots can beat the compiler by a very large margin. It's important to know when to spend the effort, and that is also part of what marks an excellent programmer. David> The end result is that it is not necessary to spend the David> hours/days/weeks [many fondly remembered] to make a program a David> few bytes smaller or a few cycles quicker. True, but about a year ago I spent a week or so on a routine that takes about 30% of the CPU, and (with the help of a CPU expert) made it 50% faster. It started out faster already than what the compiler could do; the end result is way beyond any compiler designer's fondest imagination. David> Having a basic understanding of machine architecture and "what David> goes on under the hood" is critical to writing good David> code. Knowing the details [e.g. specific directives for David> implementing a macro] is not. I recently finished a job using David> a major microsprocessor [PIC] that DOES NOT HAVE A David> [accessable] STACK. So? A 360 doesn't have a stack either, but that doesn't prevent it call is like the PDP8. But it supported Algol, which taught recursion to C. paul