Need Assembly lang. to learn C?

[Pete Holsberg]

In article <1991May21.212024.11580 at ux1.cso.uiuc.edu> phil at ux1.cso.uiuc.edu (Phil Howard KA9WGN) writes:
=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?
=
=I have known assembly language for some machines well, and that did help
=understand things like endianess issues.  However I think your instructor
=is just taking the short way out.  Most of what you learn in assembly is
=just not needed to learn C.  Some of it is helpful, but that could all be
=included in the course.

I think that the instructor's recommendation was meant so that the
student would gain an appreciation for some of the inner workings of a
computer system.  If a student has worked for a semester with registers,
stacks, memory allocation for variables, etc., he/she will find it much
easier to understand some of the things that go wrong with C programs
(or it just may make the instructor's job easier!).  You may recall the
student program I posted a week or so ago where he had allocated "char"
storage for a variable but used 'scanf("%d", &var)' to get a value.  It
was difficult for me to explain where the extra bytes were going and why
they clobbered the first entry of a "nearby" array of strings.  Had he
had an ASL background, I could have explained it precisely.

Pete
-- 
Prof. Peter J. Holsberg      Mercer County Community College
Voice: 609-586-4800          Engineering Technology, Computers and Math
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