Paul G. Allen wrote: > kelsey hudson wrote: > >[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > > > >>Assembly is useful to learn. It helps you understand CPUs > >>and ultimately what your high level code is doing under the hood. > > > >Agreed. Everyone should learn assembly. > > Everyone should learn it before learning C and other high level languages.
I disagree. While I do think that knowing assembly is good, I do not think it is useful before learning a high-level language. High level languages (Pascal) teach you the concepts. Assembly bogs you down in details. If you have no grasp of the concept (forest) you will get lost in the details (trees). This is the same reason I think learning perl or C first is bad. Perl is too obfuscated, and C requires too much detail work. Learn the concept, then learn the tools. If you are given all the parts to make a birdhouse, but no picture of a finished result, nor any directions, you will have a hard time building it if you have not done it before. That is how I see learning assembly before learning the concepts of programming. If you want even finer grained descriptions: If you are given a nail, a board, and a hammer, how do you know that the nail is supposed to go in straight unless you have been told or seen it? I also disagree that C s a high-level language. The two best descriptions I have heard are: 1) Middle-Level Language and 2) Macro-Assembler. -john -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
