On Apr 16, 2010, at 8:30 AM, Justin Richards wrote:

> This is one of the reasons why i feel more confident writing assembler
> (not that I am great at that either) because addressing and indirect
> addressing is by comparison straight forward in assembler.

I have to agree that programming in assembler can be very helpful  
toward understanding pointers.
>
> mov ax,[bx + 100]
> what could be simpler to understand.

Especially on CISC-y computers :-)  The PIC assembler to do this would  
not be so simple to understand.  OTOH, I don't remember offhand  
whether x86 assembler (or machine language) uses the size of the  
datatype in the index calculations.  If bx contains 1000, does this  
load ax from address 1400 because ax is of size 4, or from 1100  
because of simpler assumptions?


> temp_p = &timer mind you I dont think you need to do that in assembler
> because you always have the address.

Yes, but this is the difference between
	mov ax, myvariable
and	mov ax, offset myvariable
or maybe mov ax, #myvariable


> but perhaps if in c [alternate suggestion for pointer syntax] ...
> on second thought that is worse.

Yeah.  It's just syntax.  Once you get used to the C syntax I don't  
think it's particularly worse than any assembler...

I used a language once that took the position that ALL variables were  
pointers, and if you wanted the values you had to dereference the  
pointers explicitly using the "." operator.  So you'd have code that  
looked like:
	.var1 = .a + .b*2
It was ... interesting, I guess.  But I'm glad it didn't catch on!

BillW

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