From: "M. Edward (Ed) Borasky" <znmeb@...>
Date: 2007-09-30T03:24:59+09:00
Subject: Re: Confession: I never did ASM

Julian Tarkhanov wrote:
> 
> On 29-sep-2007, at 19:05, Brian Adkins wrote:
> 
>> What's wrong with this group? No one has mentioned K&R ???
> 
> I don't want to go doing C just yet without having some understanding of 
> what it is doing.
> Moreover, without these fundamentals C looks like a pile of terrible 
> klunky gunk to me, the workings of
> which I can neither understand nor use. That's what I am trying to 
> resolve in the first place, hoping that
> understanding the machine will help me wrap my head around the gunkiness 
> and klunkiness (by at least
> knowing that it is justified).

I think at some point (probably coincident with the "RISC revolution" in 
processor design) machine architectures, compilers and the C language 
became inextricably intertwined. To a lesser extent, Unix also got 
intertwined into the mix, although there were a number of other 
operating systems that leveraged off of this, one of which -- Windows NT 
-- still thrives.

So I'm not sure you can separate the gunkiness and clunkiness of 
assembler and C any more. At least for the Intel and AMD x86-64 
architectures, there's some marvelously detailed information at 
http://www.agner.org/optimize on both C++ and assembler level gunkiness 
and clunkiness.