Assembly code is for writing C compilers, and C compilers are for writing Lisp interpreters.
I saw a Scheme interpreter written in assembly running a C compiler written in Scheme.
There’s actually good reasons for this design. It’s easy to write a Scheme interpreter in assembly, but it’s hard to write a C compiler in assembly that handles everything correctly. Much rather write it in higher level language if possible and Scheme lowers the bar to getting there, so you can get away from using assembly as quickly as possible. Or you can copy somebody else’s Scheme implementation of a C compiler because now you’re platform independent.
Then you can write your C compiler in C (or steal a better compiler already written in C) and close the loop. For your final step, you use the C compiler to compile itself.
Not the first C compiler obviously. According to this Stack Overflow post, BCPL* begat B, which begat C. Language self-hosting is pretty fascinating.
*Perhaps BCPL was originally written in assembly; I’m not certain: https://github.com/SergeGris/BCPL-compiler
Back in High School in the 80’s me and a buddy wrote a Z-80 editor assembler in TRS-DOS BASIC.
It was not rocket science.
I never did get very far with the TRS-80 Editor Assembler, but that was my first exposure to such things.
I also remember the BASIC code for the Dancing Daemon which was replete with PEEKs and POKEs, such that much of it was written in machine code.
Mebly I do, and mebly I don’t.
You dropped this \
Short explanation: Type ¯\\\_(ツ)\_/¯ to see ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.
Long expanation: Lemmy supports formatting, like _italic_ becomes italic. To stop this from happening, you can put a \ before it like \_; the \ isn’t shown. This is why ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ becomes ¯_(ツ)_/¯. To show a \ you need an additional \ like so: \\, and to make sure _ is shown and not turned into italic, it too needs \. This is why ¯\\\_(ツ)\_/¯ becomes ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I’m sorry, I have no idea what you’re talking about. Could you explain it in assembly?
In college back in 1991. Also had to do PASCAL and FORTRAN but thankfully those two were in a single course.
I also took PASCAL in the 90s, but it is considered a high level language, and writes similarly to other high lvl languages, assembly has a very different syntax
Oh, I know. I meant that we had to take courses on older languages as part of the curriculum. That was a funky little college program. The oddest experience for me was taking Python back in the day as the “new thing” then not seeing it again until it absolutely exploded ~10 years ago. That program is also why I ended up playing with Linux so early on. The professors truly seemed to have a passion for emerging technologies while not wanting anyone to forget what came before. Thankfully, no punch cards.
I remember watching assembly demos in the early-mid 90s and thinking those guys were wizards
I get the feeling that all of these assembly jokes are justifications to avoid learning assembly.
You can still make syscalls in assembly. Assembly isnt magic. It isn’t starting from the creation of matter and energy, it’s just very specific code.
A very bad one if it requires switching off a large portion of your brain to find it funny.
