Need Assembly lang. to learn C?

[John F. Woods]

ldstern at rodan.acs.syr.edu (Larry Stern) writes:
>To all: a local instructor, who teaches C, has told several of us who are
>interested in his course that we should take an Assembly language course
>first. Even though his course is C in the DOS environment and a knowledge
>of 8088/80286 would no doubt be useful, we are wondering if this is really
>necessary. Any comments from C programmers?

Well, when I first learned LISP, I had a great deal of trouble figuring out
how cons cells were supposed to work until I saw an example of pointer
manipulation in assembly language.  For some people, for some problems, an
understanding of how the bits fly will help in understanding high-level
concepts.

Most of the time, however, a reasonable presentation of C should not require
any assembly language background (it certainly wasn't assumed for the C course
I taught).  If the professor insists upon Assembly because he thinks that you
can't do anything efficiently in C, you should ask him to rethink his
pedagogical style (or to actually learn the damned language ;-)).  If he plans
to give examples of how to do interrupt glue code and the like, he ought to
a) prepare quickie instructional material for the 8086, and b) prepare
similar instructional material for the 68000, 88000, MIPS, VAX, and 6502,
so that he can give his students a breadth of knowledge that will enable
them to better understand the NEXT processor chip that comes out, rather than
saying "I'm stumped, I've read this data sheet forwards and backwards and
can't find the AX register!!!!!"