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Date:Mon Jul 6 06:20:11 1993 
Subject:Re: Bugs, Death and everything 
From:"A.Sloman" 
Volume-ID:930706.01 

Very interesting comments.

> I used to program embedded systems in assembly language.  The code was
> easy to write efficiently, and usually worked first time.  To debug it
> was easy because there was no one else's compiler or operating system to
> screw things up.  All the errors were mine (with one exception) so very
> easy to find and correct.
> ....
>
> My colleague Alistair has said that I could have developed my image
> analysis and multivariate analysis system faster and more efficiently if
> I had used Z80 machine code rather than poplog.

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

E.g. if it were program that did a lot of parsing or planning and had to
build lots of complex and tangled temporary data structures of with lots
of cross links, and had to reclaim space from time to time, and had to
compact to prevent fragmentation, and had to leave some things unmoved
because they were pointed to "from outside", and had to make use of
inheritance of types to sub-types to support "re-use" and "modularity",
would it still have been just as easy in machine code as in Poplog?

I suspect there are some programmers for whom the answer may be yes
and the vast majority for whom it would be no.

But maybe that's because I have been indoctrinated, and have never
written machine code programs?

Aaron