Andy Neil wrote:
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Steve Taylor wrote:
<i>"GOOD assembler code IS difficult to write."</i>

But, with a HLL, you can write lots of BAD code quickly & easily!

The fact is, writing GOOD code in non-trivial in <b>any</b> language; the secret of good code is in the design/thought/planning/preparation.

People often assume that Assembler is <i>inherently</i> more efficient than a HLL; this is not <i>necessarily</i> the case - good 'C' code with a good optimising compiler <i>can</i> be very efficient.

...Absolutely, I should have made it clear that I meant this to apply to HLL. I think its easier/better to learn design/thought/planning/preparation in HLL

Assembler is great, but it is a very specific, very local dialect of a language. You can't "speak" 68000 , Pentium, i960, ARM by learning just 8052. OK, some ideas translate, but not all.

Learning "assembler" is far too specific, better to understand generalised programming constructs like WHILE DO, REPEAT UNTIL, GOTO, GOSUB, from HLL examples than to try and implement your own half-assed interpretations.

My own path to enlightenment was:I started on Basic(hanging around in Radio Shack and running their TRS80 basic package), then Pascal, then Zilog Z800 assembler, then C, then a bit of Fortran, then 8052 machine code, then Basic52, then 8052 assembler then 8052 Pascal, then Delphi, now Kylix (which is amazing....)

Steve
Steve