I have programmed by looking up op codes in a table on a sheet of paper and entering the hex codes into an EPROM programmer.
Did this in university in the very first week, quite a few people dropped out after that 😅
Ah yes, the great filter
You are.... Old?
Fucking ancient. This was for a Z80 based system using discreet logic for addressing and IO, constructed on a wire-wrapped board.
Oh that's interesting. I started poking around with a Gameboy emulator guide implemented in Python that intended to emulate a Z80. Got any good resource recommendation in case I decide to pick this back up and inevitably get stuck?
i still have a z80 reference manual on here somewhere
If you want some modern day fun with this, try the Zachtronics programming games; TIS-100, Shenzhen I/O, and Exapunks.
Or, my personal favorite I only discovered somewhat recently, try Turing Complete. You start by designing all your logic gates from just a negate gate IIRC. You eventually build up an ALU and everything else you need and then create your own computer. Then you define your own assembly language and have to write programs in your assembly language that run on the computer you've designed to complete different tasks. It's a highly underrated game, although it takes a certain type of person to enjoy.
Turing Complete looks really interesting! How polished is it? Just looked it up and saw it was in early access
I would say it's very polished. It does everything you'd expect and has some nice QoL features. There was work on a big update that'd improve performance and things, but the last information about that was from Aug of last year as far as I can tell. That's not a big deal though. The game works fine without it.
Thanks! I'll try it out over 4th of July weekend!
Another interesting low-level interpreter/emulated system to look into for anyone else trying to get started with this type of thing is the CHIP-8! It's a pretty basic 8/16-bit instruction set (there are 35 opcodes, the instructions themselves are mostly simple) and there are tons of detailed guides on making one and writing roms for them.
Ah, memories. That was me on a Spectrum. It's all fun and games until you forget to save (to tape) and your code hangs the machine, losing everything.
Did the same in school on a Z80
When I was young, we didn't have hex codes, we only had 1 and 0s. One time we where all out of 1s, and I had to code a whole Database system with only 0s!
Same, and also for the C64 :-)
You're a god amongst men around these parts.
I once knew somebody who supposedly thought that ASM was high level.
ASM is high level. Real programmers use punch cards
Real programmers use a magnetized needle and a steady hand.
There's an emacs-command to do that.
No, the emacs command is for the butterfly
Dang, I meant a neovim-Plugin
Emacs keybind?
REAL programmers tap into the electron flow across the CPU and set bits in real time
Once met a man who said he loved assembly language because it was so much nicer than punch cards and FORTRAN, but C was OK too.
This was last year. In his defense though, he's been retired for years, used to work as a professor.
Wait until you learn about micro ops and processor internals. That somebody isn't as wrong as you think.
There is no way ASM is high level
It's a matter of perspective. To someone who's job is to write the system which interprets ASM, ASM is high level
Exactly. For every level of abstraction, the abstractor is the high level and the abstractee is the lower level. Those aren't real words perhaps, but you get what I'm saying. It's all relative along the chain of abstraction.
Is it a chain though? I think it's more of a branching network that (almost?) always is stopped at quantum physics and it's theories or some form philosophy.
My mental model of it is a chain, yes. But you can define it however you like. It's just steps in some direction.
Maybe a cake would suit someone the best.
It's higher than machine code. It's degrees of highness. Any abstraction technically makes it high level.
It's not really abstraction though. It is more like syntactic sugar. In stead of 1000111011 you say ADD, but it is still the exact same thing. There is no functional, prgrammatical benefit of one over the other. It's just that asm is readable by humans.
At least thats as far as I understand asm. I haven't gone beyond NandToTetris
I would argue they don't know what that means really. Assembly is pretty much a mapping of words to machine code. It's just a way to make machine code easier to read. It doesn't actually change how it works.
A compiler re-arranges and modifies things so what you write isn't the same as the final program that is created. With assembly it is. It's not really an abstraction, but a translation. It doesn't move you further from the machine, it only makes it so you're speaking the same language.
When I learnt programming (back in early 2000s) the textbook said C is a high level 3rd generation language with 4th gen languages being something higher (I don't remember what examples were given specifically). This is back when the java applets and action script for flash were the hot things. How I miss the days without the world being cursed by JS.
I think C was 2nd, 3. is Java and Python, 4 SQL and 5th would be some hypothetical AI instruction language?
1st level is direct binary code as was done with punch cards. Assembly language is a 2nd level language. C is a level above, thus it's level 3.
Ah, thanks! Right, binary was one too.
I would also like to add some of the higher level features available in most assembly languages.
Memory management. You can define variables, for example, a string one containing "Hello, world!" and the compiler will correctly allocate required memory and you don't need to know its address while writing the code, you just reference the variable.
Code labels. If you want to do a conditional or unconditional jump, you need to know the address of the code you want to reach. But, obviously, every change you make to your code base will change the memory layout of your binary. Asembly provides code labels. You can think of them like function names.
Assembly allows you to reference 3rd party libraries without knowing exact function entry addresses. You just use function names like you would with C or any other language.
Modern assembly languages have even more higher level features, like macros support. And some are even hardware agnostic, like intermediate representation assembly language used in LLVM.
When the gp's book says that C is a third generation language: I would guess the first generation is Fortran and the second generation contains ALGOL and BCPL. C was heavily influenced by BCPL. (get it? C comes after B)
I think we mean different kinds of "generations".
SQL has been around since the 1970s
That doesn't mean it's not higher level than other languages from more recent times.
Level means level of abstraction. Right?
Java applets and flash were an absolute security nightmare of the highest degree.
You were just running applications on your computer.
If you had to download and run an application on your computer to view a website now people would lose their minds (and rightly so)
I mean, C is a high level language? Now, sure, C isn't a super expressive language and every C statement compiles to very few assembly instructions comparatively speaking, but it has a whole lot of stuff that assembly doesn't have. Like nice loops and other control structures and such, and not worry about which processor registers are used.
Guess what, assembly is also a high level language, lol.
But quiche is tasty!
C was always a high level language for me? As soon as I knew it existed at least.
I guess this is what gen z programmers making memes look like
In the modern world it's completely subjective.
The lowest-level language is probably ASM/machine code, as many people at least edit that regularly, and the highest-level would be LLMs. They are the shittiest way to program, yes, but technically you just enter instructions and the LLM outputs eg. Python, which is then compiled to bytecode and run. Similar to how eg. Java works. And that's the subjective part; many people (me included) don't use LLMs as the only way to program, or only use them for convenience and some help, therefore the highest level language is probably either some drag-and-drop UI stuff (like scratch), or Python/JS. And the lowest level is either C/C++ (because "no one uses ASM anyway"), or straight up machine code.
I have programmed by looking up op codes in a table on a sheet of paper and entering the hex codes into an EPROM programmer.
Did this in university in the very first week, quite a few people dropped out after that 😅
Ah yes, the great filter
You are.... Old?
Fucking ancient. This was for a Z80 based system using discreet logic for addressing and IO, constructed on a wire-wrapped board.
Oh that's interesting. I started poking around with a Gameboy emulator guide implemented in Python that intended to emulate a Z80. Got any good resource recommendation in case I decide to pick this back up and inevitably get stuck?
i still have a z80 reference manual on here somewhere
If you want some modern day fun with this, try the Zachtronics programming games; TIS-100, Shenzhen I/O, and Exapunks.
Or, my personal favorite I only discovered somewhat recently, try Turing Complete. You start by designing all your logic gates from just a negate gate IIRC. You eventually build up an ALU and everything else you need and then create your own computer. Then you define your own assembly language and have to write programs in your assembly language that run on the computer you've designed to complete different tasks. It's a highly underrated game, although it takes a certain type of person to enjoy.
Turing Complete looks really interesting! How polished is it? Just looked it up and saw it was in early access
I would say it's very polished. It does everything you'd expect and has some nice QoL features. There was work on a big update that'd improve performance and things, but the last information about that was from Aug of last year as far as I can tell. That's not a big deal though. The game works fine without it.
Thanks! I'll try it out over 4th of July weekend!
Another interesting low-level interpreter/emulated system to look into for anyone else trying to get started with this type of thing is the CHIP-8! It's a pretty basic 8/16-bit instruction set (there are 35 opcodes, the instructions themselves are mostly simple) and there are tons of detailed guides on making one and writing roms for them.
Ah, memories. That was me on a Spectrum. It's all fun and games until you forget to save (to tape) and your code hangs the machine, losing everything.
Did the same in school on a Z80
When I was young, we didn't have hex codes, we only had 1 and 0s. One time we where all out of 1s, and I had to code a whole Database system with only 0s!
Same, and also for the C64 :-)
You're a god amongst men around these parts.
I once knew somebody who supposedly thought that ASM was high level.
ASM is high level. Real programmers use punch cards
Real programmers use a magnetized needle and a steady hand.
There's an emacs-command to do that.
No, the emacs command is for the butterfly
Dang, I meant a neovim-Plugin
Emacs keybind?
REAL programmers tap into the electron flow across the CPU and set bits in real time
Once met a man who said he loved assembly language because it was so much nicer than punch cards and FORTRAN, but C was OK too.
This was last year. In his defense though, he's been retired for years, used to work as a professor.
Wait until you learn about micro ops and processor internals. That somebody isn't as wrong as you think.
There is no way ASM is high level
It's a matter of perspective. To someone who's job is to write the system which interprets ASM, ASM is high level
Exactly. For every level of abstraction, the abstractor is the high level and the abstractee is the lower level. Those aren't real words perhaps, but you get what I'm saying. It's all relative along the chain of abstraction.
Is it a chain though? I think it's more of a branching network that (almost?) always is stopped at quantum physics and it's theories or some form philosophy.
My mental model of it is a chain, yes. But you can define it however you like. It's just steps in some direction.
Maybe a cake would suit someone the best.
It's higher than machine code. It's degrees of highness. Any abstraction technically makes it high level.
It's not really abstraction though. It is more like syntactic sugar. In stead of 1000111011 you say ADD, but it is still the exact same thing. There is no functional, prgrammatical benefit of one over the other. It's just that asm is readable by humans.
At least thats as far as I understand asm. I haven't gone beyond NandToTetris
I would argue they don't know what that means really. Assembly is pretty much a mapping of words to machine code. It's just a way to make machine code easier to read. It doesn't actually change how it works.
A compiler re-arranges and modifies things so what you write isn't the same as the final program that is created. With assembly it is. It's not really an abstraction, but a translation. It doesn't move you further from the machine, it only makes it so you're speaking the same language.
When I learnt programming (back in early 2000s) the textbook said C is a high level 3rd generation language with 4th gen languages being something higher (I don't remember what examples were given specifically). This is back when the java applets and action script for flash were the hot things. How I miss the days without the world being cursed by JS.
I think C was 2nd, 3. is Java and Python, 4 SQL and 5th would be some hypothetical AI instruction language?
1st level is direct binary code as was done with punch cards. Assembly language is a 2nd level language. C is a level above, thus it's level 3.
Ah, thanks! Right, binary was one too.
I would also like to add some of the higher level features available in most assembly languages.
Modern assembly languages have even more higher level features, like macros support. And some are even hardware agnostic, like intermediate representation assembly language used in LLVM.
When the gp's book says that C is a third generation language: I would guess the first generation is Fortran and the second generation contains ALGOL and BCPL. C was heavily influenced by BCPL. (get it? C comes after B)
I think we mean different kinds of "generations".
SQL has been around since the 1970s
That doesn't mean it's not higher level than other languages from more recent times.
Level means level of abstraction. Right?
Java applets and flash were an absolute security nightmare of the highest degree.
You were just running applications on your computer.
If you had to download and run an application on your computer to view a website now people would lose their minds (and rightly so)
I mean, C is a high level language? Now, sure, C isn't a super expressive language and every C statement compiles to very few assembly instructions comparatively speaking, but it has a whole lot of stuff that assembly doesn't have. Like nice loops and other control structures and such, and not worry about which processor registers are used.
Guess what, assembly is also a high level language, lol.
But quiche is tasty!
C was always a high level language for me? As soon as I knew it existed at least.
I guess this is what gen z programmers making memes look like
In the modern world it's completely subjective.
The lowest-level language is probably ASM/machine code, as many people at least edit that regularly, and the highest-level would be LLMs. They are the shittiest way to program, yes, but technically you just enter instructions and the LLM outputs eg. Python, which is then compiled to bytecode and run. Similar to how eg. Java works. And that's the subjective part; many people (me included) don't use LLMs as the only way to program, or only use them for convenience and some help, therefore the highest level language is probably either some drag-and-drop UI stuff (like scratch), or Python/JS. And the lowest level is either C/C++ (because "no one uses ASM anyway"), or straight up machine code.