April 2003
Intermediate to advanced
576 pages
15h 13m
English
The convenience and greater portability of high-level languages raise the very real question of why anyone should study assembly language. Is it some arcane rite of initiation for the truly computer-savvy? Or is the primary motivation to see how a computer really works?
In a purely intellectual sense, an in-depth appreciation of at least one computer architecture is incredibly helpful in trying to comprehend its most basic strengths and weaknesses. Moreover, in a pragmatic sense, assembly language may make it possible to accomplish the following:
the fastest attainable execution speed;
the least memory usage;
very specialized data manipulation, thereby compensating for features lacking in a particular high-level ...
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