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

You may need assembly level programmers, but your entire industry is unlikely to employ them in sufficient numbers to be anything other than a blip on the radar. You also have the problem that your hardware is quite specialised and likely to diverge even more as time goes on from the general purpose CPUs that the rest of the world runs its code on. You presumably need people who understand the hardware at a sufficiently deep level. I'm not sure that machine level programming is enough for that (although I guess it *might* be a useful first step). I know that I started out with a bit of 8080, fortunately followed quite swiftly by Z80 (and CP/M). Then PDP-11 and VAX MACRO languages. So a trend of constantly increasing programmer friendliness. Then I had to pick up Alpha (PALcode, lovely stuff), MIPS (R5K, no branch delay slots that I recall), PowerPC, Solaris and more PPC. I learnt to be grateful for compiler's then. I still had to write machine code, but only to provide the basic underpinnings for the OS and maybe a few performance-critical bits. The rest of the time I'm either trying to make sense of debug info that spits out a bunch of registers or trying to squeeze the hardware by having it do multiple things at once. But if I look back on all of this, I still think I've spent 95% of my coding time reading and writing code in a HLL (I'm counting BLISS and C as HLL for the purpose of this message :-)) If the games industry in the UK pays well (and if it employs more than a few dozen programmers!) these days, do let me know. Antonio -- --------------- Antonio Carlini arcarlini(a)iee.org