using (ugh! yetch!) assembler

[Steven Ryan]

>As Kernighan and Ritchie say in their recent article in Byte (I'm
>paraphrasing), it's a tribute to C that there is so little assembler
>programming being done by systems programmers today.  If you've ever
>had the "honor" of doing systems programming on a system that didn't
>have C, you can really appreciate this.

Well, I've done a few thousand lines of Compass (assembly) for my own
programming environment. (Actually I'm not sure how much: three binders
of doublesided laser printer listings.)

I'm not sure if that constitutes system programming, because part of I did
was build a multitasking executive between rest of my code and NOS. Oh, and
I rewrote the I/O interface to handle various character sets, command line
parsing, strange file structures (no EOR before EOI, as when SFM attaches
the job dayfile).

It was an honour. And alotta fun. Now I have the `honour' of learning C and
Unix. And I thought Cybil and NOS 2 had problems.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Well, that was perhaps more bitchy than it really had to be. Just like
Wirth does for his toys, K+R built their prejudices into C. I happen to
disagree. That's fine. But I don't appreciate this waxing raptureously over
some particular language and casting every other language into the Outer
Darkness.

Perhaps, I should go away if nobody wants to listen. Problem is I've got
a bit of that old mad prophet.