Ah "the good old days". Forgot to terminate a string in a program I wrote which caused it to do a merry dance all over my hard drive requiring a complete reinstall of everything. I certainly don't miss that happening!

You certainly don't know what fun and delving into the depths of your machine are. I was about to ask "And your personal data?"

I know about the fun of delving into the depths. Was doing embedded system programming in assembly language back when the PIC was the latest thing on the market.
My main project at the moment is an industrial application to replace an old existing system with off the shelf parts. Lots of reverse engineering. The existing setup runs on a 286 with DOS 3.3 and a dos extender. It's got the biggest i/o card I've ever seen.

Not to forget that some machine language programmers still consider assembly language as a high level one

Are you being serious or do you really believe microcontroller system design and programming are anything else than [here a word I cannot write in this forum]? I mean, do you not see a microcontroller (this is the core of any emmbeded system) is nothing but an entire computer put into a single chip? Your entire computer, for example. That has necessarily to be the most boring occupation in the whole world.


@Didier: assembly language is just a name for microprocessor mnemonics (sic). That who considers it high-level has not the least idea what his work is about.

Low level is one step above hardware. And hardware engineers have long ago shown to have more imagination in one single neuron than software developers in all of their heads put together. These people only utilize a very tiny fraction of the power present day hardware
state-of-the-art has to offer them.

One other word. If you want to attain excellence in programming, proving yourself first, to be an accomplished assembly language programmmer, will be a sine qua non condition. But even a more important condition will be this: prove yourself to be an excellent mathematician, because mathematics is in the basis of all programming or more plainly: programming and all of compute science is but a tiny branch of mathematics.

Not true. In 8086 assembler there are variables, macros, program flow control, arithmetic and logic operations, procedures... That's far from being restricted to just other names for machine instructions.

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2 members found this post helpful.

I have spoken enough. The aim of post #1 has been, I think, more than fully attained, thanks to the effort of people committed to help others. As for those people more interested in having fun, well, my advice is to go to ... LQ>General.

I think some misinterpretation of your post on my part, strongly helped by my poor knowledge of English, prompted the posting of post #35. I here publicly apologize for that disproportionate response. May you have a fine week-end.