I started out many years ago learning Assembler. I was ok at it, but I didn't have anything to program. I did enjoy it though. Is there any practical value to knowing Assembler any longer? Or should one just focus on the lead from the major players and program in their shells?
2007-03-08 23:31:19 · 5 answers · asked by Anonymous in Computers & Internet ➔ Programming & Design
Assembler might be useful for some things that might run slow in a higher language. This has always been the case. Dithering algorithms to open and close video, audio or picture files.
As a general rule in today's world you need to work in higher level languages because of objects, which are not going to be the same to work with in Assembler.
You probably worked with it in DOS, which I did, or for something like the Amiga, Atari ST or older Macs.
Programming has come a long way since then with objects.
In the old days objects were limited and a part of the OS. You called up an alert box and filled it in with text.
Today you drag and drop almost everything graphic you see on the screen from this text box to the labels of text around it. You drag and drop internet browsers. You drag and drop video players. You drag and drop audio players. You drag and drop file selector boxes. You drag and drop connections to data bases.
Unless you're running a full screen 3-D animation for some game, Assembler is going to be a pain to get anything else done. Your code will be quicker if you design it yourself rather than relying on the parsing, linking, library and final assembly generations of Visual C++
Also your code won't be portable.
A Visual C++ program can work on both Mac and PC and Unix based machines with only front end changes and different libraries.
2007-03-09 00:06:34 · answer #1 · answered by Anonymous · 3⤊ 0⤋
Knowing assembler can put you ahead of other programmers. They won't understand what is really going on internally, so it will seem like 'magic' to them, whereas you will understand what your high level language is doing. Also, you have the ability to examine the output assembly from a compiler to determine if you can optimize your code better. Rarely, you may even write assembler code to do things that a high level language won't optimize properly.
You'll probably never use it in programming, but it is good and necessary to know.
2007-03-09 09:40:41 · answer #2 · answered by Pfo 7 · 0⤊ 0⤋
As a hobby, I use assembler for programming PIC devices. You can make all sorts of fun gadgets with these and the development environment is free to download.
Assembler gives you a good feel for how computers work at the lowest level, which is a useful skill. Apart from devices like PICs though, the industry has moved on, and to be honest it is a bit of a dead skill
2007-03-09 07:53:15 · answer #3 · answered by amania_r 7 · 2⤊ 0⤋
Even though the contemporary languages are more demanding, assembler has its own place, and the todays secret in programming to know more than one language and to be familiar with complex technologies. Disassembling is the last chain maybe. Assembler is real. It's at the hardware level. In your situation it is good to know another language to c++ for example. If you were a programmer in nVidia for example, you'll need assembler i quess for device driver-writing ;-).
2007-03-09 07:50:24 · answer #4 · answered by arthur_vardanian 1 · 1⤊ 0⤋
I would, even though you can get compilers which will convert all your code, sometimes when you are programming and it does not work it is good to be able to read the assembled code and see whats going wrong
2007-03-09 07:38:18 · answer #5 · answered by peter l 2 · 2⤊ 0⤋