Re: the power of assembly
Posted: Wed Dec 01, 2010 6:15 pm
GyroVorbis wrote:C was not designed to "replace" assembly, and it could not possibly ever do that. As I said before, there are processor-specific opcodes and registers can provide extremely useful functionality that are literally inaccessible due to the platform-independent nature of higher level languages.
Yes, as far as general software development goes, there is almost no compelling reason to go that low level. But there are still times and places (especially when integrating with hardware or working on embedded platforms) where you literally do not have any choice.
Actually C was designed as a replacement of assembly by Dennis Ritchie back in the early 70's so that programs could be portable across UNIX systems, not as "replace" in the sense to do away with it!
houston