• Cethin
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    09 months ago

    Anyone who thinks OP asking about Assembly with this meme should play the game Turing Complete. It’s great. You have to design a computer all the way from the most basic logic gates (I think you only get a NAND gate to start), designing an ALU and CPU, creating your own machine language, and writing your own programs in the language you designed, and it’s all simulated the whole time. Machine language is pretty advanced as far as things go.

    • @Cavemanfreak@lemm.ee
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      09 months ago

      We got to do something simular in uni. We modeled the CPU in VHDL and had to set up our own language, then we were to program a game for it. One of the most fun and interesting courses we got to do!

    • sagOP
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      09 months ago

      I have Dyslexia ¯_(ツ)_/¯ Sorry.

      • Fonzie!
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        9 months ago

        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)_/¯

        • @AnUnusualRelic@lemmy.world
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          09 months ago

          The backslash is known as an escape character in this context, because it removes (escapes) the special meaning of the following character.

          It’s also used that way in most Unix shells.

          • Fonzie!
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            9 months ago
            global _main
                extern  _GetStdHandle@4
                extern  _WriteFile@20
                extern  _ExitProcess@4
            
                section .text
            _main:
                ; DWORD  bytes;    
                mov     ebp, esp
                sub     esp, 4
            
                ; hStdOut = GetstdHandle( STD_OUTPUT_HANDLE)
                push    -11
                call    _GetStdHandle@4
                mov     ebx, eax    
            
                ; WriteFile( hstdOut, message, length(message), &bytes, 0);
                push    0
                lea     eax, [ebp-4]
                push    eax
                push    (message_end - message)
                push    message
                push    ebx
                call    _WriteFile@20
            
                ; ExitProcess(0)
                push    0
                call    _ExitProcess@4
            
                ; never here
                hlt
            message:
                db      '¯\\\_(ツ)\_/¯', 10
            message_end:
            
        • @ulterno@lemmy.kde.social
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          9 months ago

          Alternatively, you can just use the `` enclosure, used for single line code.
          That is a “grave accent” or a “backtick”, the key you will find on the left of the ‘1’ key and under the ‘Esc’ key on a standard (ISO, maybe) 104/105 key qwerty keyboard.

          ¯\_(ツ)_

  • @geekworking@lemmy.world
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    09 months ago

    Look at mister fancy pants with and assembler.

    How about entering straight opcode, operand with only a hex keypad and two pairs of 7 segment LEDs. You can only see one set of numbers at a time. You had to write it out on paper to be able to keep track and count positions so you don’t use your spot.

    I had to do this as a project in school. Two 8088 units that we breadboarded to a UART that we used to drive a fiber optic link to communicate with each other with a basic protocol. All descrete components hand wired and coded.

    It made you tie all of skills together into a full system of hardware and software.

  • @NauticalNoodle@lemmy.ml
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    9 months ago

    I’ve been studying Arm Aarch32 lately. I have a software development academic background but I have always been interested in Architecture.

  • Hanrahan
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    09 months ago

    Not since the 1980s on a Commodore 64.

    SYS64738

  • @abcd@feddit.org
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    9 months ago

    IMHO assembly isn’t hard. When you gain enough experience you start to see „visual patterns“ in your code. For example jumping over some lines often equals to a if/else statement or jumping back is often a loop etc. Then you are able to skim code without the necessity to read each line.

    The most difficult part is to keep track of the big picture because it is so verbose. Otherwise it’s a handful or two of instructions you use 90+% of the time.

    I needed it often in the past in the PLC world but it is dying out slowly. Nonetheless, when I encounter 30+ year old software I’m happy to be able to get along. And your experience transitions to other architectures like changing from one higher language to another.

    Nonetheless, if I’m able to choose, I’ll take Go. Please and thank you 😊

    • @wewbull@feddit.uk
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      9 months ago

      The most difficult part is to keep track of the big picture because it is so verbose. Otherwise it’s a handful or two of instructions you use 90+% of the time.

      It’s a long time since I wrote any assembly in anger, but I don’t remember this being an issue. Back then Id be writing 2D and 3D graphics demos. Reasonably complex things, but the challenge was always getting it fast enought to keep the frame rate up, not code structure.

      As you say, I think you just establish patterns to decompose the problem.

  • @davel@lemmy.ml
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    09 months ago

    Assembly code is for writing C compilers, and C compilers are for writing Lisp interpreters.

  • @NocturnalMorning@lemmy.world
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    09 months ago

    I learned assembly for a few weeks when I first started a new job once (didn’t even have anything to do with my job), and I always felt like my brain was tired after trying to write in assembly. Just took so much more mental concentration than writing in c for example.

  • JoYo
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    09 months ago

    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.

  • @HStone32@lemmy.world
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    09 months ago

    Not exactly accurate, I think. Even machine language is bound by the CPU’s architecture. You can’t do anything in machine language that wasn’t specifically provided for by the CPU architects.

    It would be more accurate to say it’s like creating a new universe using all the same laws of physics, thermodynamics, cosmology, ethics, etc as our existing universe.

    • @UNY0N@lemmy.world
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      09 months ago

      I don’t think accuracy was the goal, it is a joke not a dissertation. It’s more about how it feels to try a language like assembly after working with higher-level languages.