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Date:Mon Jul 6 09:23:40 1993 
Subject:Re: Bugs, Death and everything 
From:Helen McCall - PML Mast2 
Volume-ID:930706.02 

In reply to my simplistic comparison of assembly language with poplog, Professor Sloman writes:

> A few idle thoughts. I wonder how easy it would have been for someone
> else to maintain and debug, or port to another machine.

I would agree with Professor Sloman on this point; though it would be a lot easier for the person who originally wrote the software.  However: many 3GL & AI programmers tend to obfuscate their code for the same reason.  It gives job security!

> I don't doubt what you say, but I wonder about the *range* of
> programming tasks for which what you say is true.

One adopts a different style to programming in assembly.  I would personally avoid tangled data structures or inheritance of types and subtypes.

However: routine algorythms for parsing can be just as easy in assembly.  They merely require an understanding of BOOLean operations and binary arithmatic to make them much more elegant than any solution in a higher language.

The same applies to routine control structures such as switch statements et al.

The code (my code) is easy to read because I believe in commenting each line and each routine etc.  I also keep rigidly to the correct fields in the code.

This does howeve need reasonably good touch typing skills to enable one to input so much text into the source files!

Helen.