On Thursday 14 April 2005 20:29, Richard wrote:
On Thursday 14 April 2005 06:44 pm, Anders Johansson wrote:
If you meant the machine language was so nice you could use it easily without the help of these tools, well, we obviously have different definitions of fun :):) At least my brain needs the text to get an overview. A list of numbers to me is just a list of numbers.
I've read claims that Seymore Cray wrote the first OS for his supercomputer directly in machine language, and in octal code at that. I'm not sure I can force myself to believe that
Anders, once upon a time machine language was all you had. The big jump was to nmemonics like lda, ldb etc as used in assembler. For those that had to program in that environment it became easy. You would look at a word in octal or in lites and recognise op codes and operands.
Like any language it depended on how much you used it. The more you used it the easier it became. I'm sure there are a few grey haired old farts that still can talk machine. Fortunately I have forgotten all that nice stuff, I think. But I can bellieve some old purist did it in machine, primarily to get the speed he needed. We used to call it optimum programming.
But that was a looong time ago, when the world and machines were simpler.
Geez you're bringing back memories (nightmares.) I'm hardly an old fart -- no grey hair yet. But, I remember writing assembly/ml programs on my first computer -- an Atari 800 (6502) -- without an assembler. Couldn't afford a lot of software or a floppy drive. Just me, the Atari, a tape recorder, and some books. I'd code on paper, convert instructions to hex, then make a second pass to resolve addresses and add offsets. I think I made a pretty fine two-pass compiler.