Noel Chiappa wrote: > It's worth teaching a bit of machine/assembler language, so that students > understand how computers _actually work_, underneath. > > [example of students who wrote octal math for CLU]
Back in 1983 I needed an assembler for the Motorola 6809, so I wrote one in Lisp on a TRS-80 Model I. I know very well how things really work (I design microprocessors at the transistor level) and yet I created a hex math package in Lisp just like in your example. Sure it was orders of magnitude slower than using the language's native math and doing all the conversions in the i/o routines, but it was very elegant and was fast enough for the sizes of the programs we needed to assemble. So while I insist on knowing all the details, I also enjoy tools that don't depend on me knowing. -- Jecel
