Assembly or ....

[Dave Martindale]

In article <1107 at esunix.UUCP> bpendlet at esunix.UUCP (Bob Pendleton) writes:
>
>Somewhere along the way we all pick up a sense of good and bad, right
>and wrong, truth and lie, beauty and ugly... We see something and it
>strikes us as good, right, correct, beautiful, it pleases us. A lot of
>people see high level code as good, beautiful, and right, and low
>level code as bad, ugly, and wrong. Trying to read a piece of assembly
>langauge that you wrote last month might convince you that low level
>code is indeed bad, ugly, and wrong. Haiku stands the test of time and
>readability much better than assembly language.

I've seen some elegant assembly code, and it's elegant for the same
reasons that higher-level code is elegant: it does its job precisely
and cleanly and well.  And, in some sense, it does it more cleanly than
the equivalent compiled code, or does something that compiled code
could not do as well.  However, such pieces of elegant assembly code
are seldom more than one screen, or one printer page, in size.

There are people who can write well-structured, clean, readable
assembly code that goes on for hundreds of pages.  I've known
a few of them.  They also write good high-level-language code,
and generally do so when suitable compilers are available.

In my opinion, excellent programmers can write well in both assembly
and compiled languages, and can thus choose the best language for
the job at hand.  (You could argue that this extends to fluency in
interpreted languages as well).