6 Jan
2012
6 Jan
'12
7:04 p.m.
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.
Hmm chess machines range from the PDP 8 with 4K to massive computing
systems.
So how well did it play?
Ben.