On Tue, Sep 4, 2012 at 12:13 AM, Al Kossow <aek at bitsavers.org> wrote:
The problem I see with the Cambridge examples is students don't LEARN
anything
about what they're programming on. They're given a bunch of magic recipes
and
don't learn what they're for. What you end up with is what you
could have done with 10 lines of Z80 assembly talking to a terminal through
a
UART, but in the example you have to make your own terminal, talking to a
big
blob of USB stack and graphics coprocessor glue.
Sorry, I don't see that. I think the article gives a reasonable level
of depth, explaining certain things in detail - see for example the
pink boxes on the right-hand side, explaining what eg. the assembler
instructions do. The article is far more in depth than just "type
these magic lines to see stuff".
And the fact that the GPU and USB stack are black boxes? For
introduction into OS concepts, why is that a problem (at the level
that this article is aimed at)? When introducing Z80 assembler, you
also look at the Z80 as a magic black box that you give commands to
which then does stuff. You don't need to know the internal
microarchitecture of a CPU to program it. (Yes, it helps, to the
advanced user - but to teach introductory assembly programming?)
--
Joachim Thiemann ::
http://jthiem.bitbucket.org ::
http://signalsprocessed.blogspot.com