Well, there is a real thing to discuss behind all those stories, IMHO. Due to pipelining issues the proper order of instructions in the instruction stream becomes more important for modern hardware, and that is something that a human coder cannot do as good as a good optimizing compiler can. So I believe that ASSEMBLER programming will stay for some amount of time, because it is still important to manage those old application systems that are still around and working well, and it will continue to be important for some systems level work, but for application programming and new development, the future is elsewhere.
Kind regards Bernd Am Dienstag, 5. April 2011 12:57 schrieb Chris Mason: > Bernd > > Since we're telling stories, this reminds me of a time in the early 1970s > when IBM was "pushing" PL/I. > > I was in a technical support centre and a salesman called me in order to > ask - presumably "pass on" - a question. He said that it was known that > PL/I carried an "overhead" but "What was the "overhead" with assembler?". > > I answered with as much sympathy replacing the natural scorn as I possibly > could! But now, having read this thread, I wonder if I gave the right > answer! > > Chris Mason >