> > [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.

It's the 22nd century. Therefore the 20th century (including 1974) would
be last century, not so?  :)

I did use switches and such, but the first personal computer I built
had a hex keypad (6502 based) for entering the machine code. Trust
me, I don't *ever* want to do that again!

> 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.

As an engineering major, we had a course in PDP-8 assembly code. Our
teacher stated that one of the main goals of the course was to convince
people that programming in assembly unnecessarily was *wrong*. High-level
languages are more efficient for the programmer, and for many machines
they handle the machine level as efficiently as a good programmer.

> 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

Yes. And it is *much* easier to see the algorithms in a high-level language.
--
D. Jay Newman           !
jay@sprucegrove.com     ! Xander: Giles, don't make cave-slayer unhappy.
http://enerd.ws/robots/ !

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