Comment by brown
1 year ago
Learning assembly was profound for me, not because I've used it (I haven't in 30 years of coding), but because it completed the picture - from transistors to logic gates to CPU architecture to high-level programming. That moment when you understand how it all fits together is worth the effort, even if you never write assembly professionally.
While I think that learning assembly is very useful, I think that one must be careful at applying assembly language concepts in a HLL C/X++/Zig..
For example, an HLL pointer is different from an assembly pointer(1). Sure the HLL pointer will be lowered to an assembly language pointer eventually but it still has a different semantic.
1: because you're relying on the compiler to use efficiently the registers, HLL pointers must be restricted otherwise programs would be awfully slow as soon as you'd use one pointer.
This out of everything, convvinced me. The more I get the "full picture" the more I appreciate what a wondrous thing computers are. I've learned all the way down to Forth/C and from the bottom up to programming FPGAs with Verilog so Assembly may be just what I need to finally close that last gap.