[brownsfan]

Yep. In fact, it gets outdated first. Assembler is the basic way to talk to a processor. It is unique to a processor or a family of processors.

[Hootowl99]

I have positive opinion of Assembler from my college days in the late 70’s. The process design classes for the last 2 semesters each had a semester long project that was the largest component of the grade. For the first semester, the class was in 4 teams with each team of collaborating on an assigned process. It involved code writing in FORTRAN to simulate the production plant front to back, determine optimum equipment sizing, energy and mass balances and capital cost. We ended up with lots of boxes computer cards totaling thousands of lines of code.

Working on the university main frame computers, it would take a number of hours of run time to test each building block much less the full program at once. One of the guys on my team was also taking a computer science class and had learned enough Assembler to add a few lines of code that tilted our access to CPU time so as to reduce our turn around time. Cool! BTW, the 4 teams in that class racked up greater CPU usage than the computer science department as a whole.

That was the last time I wrote FORTRAN code. Logical and generic command tricks I picked up on, I have used off and on over the years to create simplified simulations using spreadsheet software as the framework. First Lotus 123, then Quatro Pro and lastly Excel. It usually drives a spreadsheet bonkers since it thinks there are circular errors when you are working loops to a convergence or other loopy things. Dumb software sometimes but it works.

[Dr. Bogus Pachysandra]

“Assembler is the basic way to talk to a processor.”

Is it the same as Machine Language?