On Thu, Jul 7, 2022 at 8:30 PM Daniel <codehunte...@gmail.com> wrote: > > I am unfamiliar woththe C languages, but does it also allow one to mix both > assembly in with the C source code? Are there any other languages that > allows mixing of assembly in with the language code?
Not in the manner you are thinking of. C was developed to be a language used for systems programming. It was originally created by Dennis Ritchie at AT&T Bell Laboratories at Murray Hill, NJ, as part of the effort that created the Unix OS. Ritchie started with a language called BCPL, and enhanced that to create C. C was intended to be a high level language efficient enough that you didn't have to write in Assembler to get performance, and relatively easy to port to other architectures. The developers of Unix were programmers unhappy with the support for program development provided by the OS on the Digital Equipment mini computer they were using. There was a similar machine essentiallty unused they could get time on, so Ken Thompson and Brian Kernighan began development of a new OS called Unix. The early versions of Unix were coded in Macro-11, the assembly language of the DEC machine. This continued through Unix v6. As of v7, C was mature enough to be used, and most of Unix was rewritten in C. About 10% of the code was low level code that talked to the hardware, and was still in Macro-11. Later versions of C campiled directly to object code, and the intermediate assembly step went away. On early Unix systems, the C compiler was CC. It translated C source into asembley language for the supported architecture. That was assembled into object code by AS, the system assembler, and the object code was combined by LD, the linkage editor, into a finished executable. It was possible to interrupt the process at the point where cc had translated C to Assembler, and hand optimize the assembly code before continuing the process. A key point here was that programs were modular. There would be more than one C source file making up the completed program, so there wasn't really a need for inline assembler. If performance wasn't what was hoped for, you profiled the C code to see where the problems were, and rewrote the offending C code, or coded it in assembler as needed. High level language development on DOS in BASIC or Pascal tended to be in one big file, so being able to have Assembler inline was a boon. ______ Dennis _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
