fstp Q
jc LESS
and ah,20h
Jnz EQUAL
mov eax,0C00002h ;Greater
Another hour of Tim Vine last night. While it might not have more than a few absolute guffaws, the continuous stream of puns means that the amusement meter never falls below a certain level of entertainment. The extras are quite fine as well.
I have a note in the book from Friday in which I expressed a desire to write a poem about assembly language. It suddenly struck me as I was writing that sentence that assembler itself looks a bit like a poem anyway, though obviously one where the meaning is different from your run-of-the-mill ode (ode instead of code perhaps). But it still has meaning and even metre and rhyme; it just doesn't quite have the emotional content. My sudden desire to get back into assembler was sparked by the sight of some short function that had replaced a much clearer function written in c and was obviously just a way of advertising someones expertise at push, pop and mv. All of sudden I was back with my head in an 8086 book marvelling at how one could move a single bit from one place to another. Of course the range of addresses through which those bits can be moved is now 1000s of times bigger than it was then, meaning that I am sure no one really bothers with it these days. I worry that there will be a point when there is not one person left who understands the low-level stuff of computing and assembler and machine code will become like mystical deities on which the entire world relies but nobody can change. At that point, the whole architecture will be frozen, only changing in speed and magnitude without any ability to tune the underlying code to fit changes in the world, gradually becoming more and more inefficient as the hardware loses sight of the software. If we suddenly kick all our code over to quantum computing we will have to learn a completely new low-level architecture in order to program anything. Never mind - it was nice while it lasted.
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