> [mailto:PICLIST@MITVMA.MIT.EDU]On Behalf Of Jinx
>
> Entering binary and hex with switches and pushbuttons, which
> comparitively is how the OP say he programs, is so last century
>

Surely not last century.  You make me feel old :-)  We had to cold start our
Sperry Univac/Varian minicomputers from the front panel as recently as 1974.
We put the paper tape boot loader in through the front panel, then fed the
paper tape in which created teletype and magnetic tape drivers.  The mag
tape system generation (setup) program ran with interactive instructions
from the teletype.  A typing mistake could make you lose an hour's work.
And, of course, we wrote the paper tape driver in assembler first.

We hated it at the time, and I can't imagine anyone working in machine code
voluntarily.  It adds nothing to the development process at the expense of
huge amounts of tedious work that the computer will always do better than a
human can.

And while I'm on my soap box, the more I work with C, the more I'm finding
that there is VERY little room for improvement by going to assembler.  One
of my current projects was jammed, so I have spent weeks analyzing the code.
There were no big gains to be had by converting to assembler.  All of the
gains have been acheived by smarter design.  There is no doubt that there
are a few places where the compiler wastes a few bytes, but I haven't found
anything that would justify the loss of productivity in using assembler.
There is no doubt, though, that it is worthwhile to examine the assembler.
I have cut functions in half through some restructuring.

I am very interested in getting the best value for my effort, so I'm open to
correction here, but after looking at the generated code, but I really
couldn't do it any tighter directly.  To put this in perspective, my project
is over 30,000 bytes, so saving 500 bytes wouldn't come close to justifying
converting it to assembler.


Bruce Partridge
http://www.rebreather.ca
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