Pascal not considered harmful - was Re: Rich kids are into COBOL

Those two sentences are only somewhat related. Knowing instruction encoding is important to anyone who is writing or maintaining an assembler or disassembler. Or who is working with malware (either generating it or analyzing it) or other deliberately-obscured code. Or who is designing, building, or debugging hardware. Or who is writing or maintaining a hardware simulator. Not as valuable as in the days when dealing with machine code was a routine programming task, but, I think, more than "not...even marginally valuable". (Personally, I fall into the first, second, and fourth of those camps: I've done assemblers and disassemblers, I've picked apart captured malware, and I've done a hardware simulator.) /~\ The ASCII Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML mouse at rodents-montreal.org / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B