Programmer's conundrums

On 4/2/2006 at 8:30 PM Jim Battle wrote: I disagree. Consider that, as a manager, you might be looking at a whole herd of people who have perfect university transcripts and impressive resum?s. That mostly tells me that (A) they knew how to be students and take tests and (B) had a very talented writer for their resum?s. Neither tells me anything about their on-the-job capabilities and more importantly, their ability to program. And I've interviewd enough people who can lay down an impressive line of BS. One of the peculiar aspects of assembly language programming is the ability to hold the details of what each and every instruction does and how to apply that knowledge. So, yes, the problem posed by the CDC problem involves instinctively knowing that there's no way to store a register without clobbering another one. However, the "aha" is knowing that the RJ (return jump) instruction uses no registers but it does modify memory. So you write a list instructions that conditionally jump on the sign bit of a B register around a return jump that records whether the jump for that bit was taken, followed by an add-to-self to shift the B register left by one bit. An assembly language programmer that doesn't have the dscipline to know his instruction sets in detail and use that knowledge either writes horribly bloated code or spends inordinate amounts of time because, for instance, he doesn't realize that the 16-bit increment instructions on the 8080 don't modify any condition codes or that the 8 bit increments don't modify the carry bit. Getting an indication of this right off the bat is much easier than trying to figure out (A) where am I going to find another programmer to do what this guy was hired to do and (B) how am I going to fire the current guy without him filing a dispute with the state department of labor. Cheers, Chuck