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I feel that based on many of the threads in the C/C++ subforum, many students would benefit greatly from going down one level in abstraction.

The main question this addresses is motivation: several students are given primitives with which to perform basic programming tasks, with varying levels of context and importance. If you issue the same task in ASM, the programmer is forced to think more, and with additional constraints.

This also introduces the novice to issues that are quickly brushed under the rug in beginning C/C++ tutorials. What happens when I get an arithmetic overflow? I don't know! It depends on the context. It might mean an assertion is being violated (and maybe you don't even know you SHOULD have an assertion), or perhaps you are not even alerted to arithmetic overflow and get unexpected output, despite everything else being correct.

This is just a thought, but if the point of these forums is education, these discussions should have a new subforum.

In addition, the lack of any sticky posts in C/C++/C# is of concern. At a minimum, it should point to standard references, along with pointers to GCC installation on various systems and basic tutorials. Similar but more detailed versions are possible for both C/C++/C# and the proposed ASM subforum.

Why you should care about asm

If you haven't heard of it before, it may sound like black magic and/or fairy dust. The truth is, it is cleverly hidden from you by system programmers and compilers for good didactic reasons. You see it when you are ready to see it and look for it. There is good support for this position among practitioners. But where does it show up?

Roller coaster tycoon, for example, was written entirely in x86 assembly. This means it was written specifically for Intel processors in the 32-bit model. This is not typical, or probably even optimal, but it serves as an example of the power and flexibility of ASM. What else can you do with ASM? When you're debugging a program at a low level, you sometimes need to look at the contents of registers and memory locations to see where you're going wrong. Being familiar with instruction sets and general knowledge about how stuff works at this level helps tremendously with disassembly being useful to you (e.g. in visual studio / MSC, or otherwise). Cryptography? Immensely useful. Systems programming / drivers? Even more so. The list probably goes on with things I haven't heard of before, but I'm making the case here in a general sense: novices should at least be aware of its existence, and have somewhere to go in a familiar place (d2jsp) to do research and ask for help from peers.

-mw

Quote (killg0re @ Jul 8 2014 11:25pm)

ASM is too niche to have its own section, if there are any changes made it would need to be in the direction of less specific subforums and just simple general categories.

Programming Languages – (e.g., C, C++, Java, etc.)

Scripting, Shell, and Interpreted Languages – (e.g., Perl, Ruby, Bash, etc.)

Web Languages, Database, & Frameworks – (e.g., JavaScript, SQL, PHP, etc.)