x64 Assembly Language Step-by-Step, 4th Edition

CHAPTER 5The Right to Assemble: The Process of Creating Assembly Language Programs

The Nine and Sixty Ways to Code

Rudyard Kipling's poem “In the Neolithic Age” (1895) gives us a tidy little scold on tribal certainty. Having laid about himself successfully with his trusty diorite tomahawk, the poem's Neolithic narrator eats his former enemies while congratulating himself for following the One True Tribal Path. Alas, his totem pole has other thoughts and in a midnight vision puts our cocky narrator in his place.

“There are nine and sixty ways of constructing tribal lays,

And every single one of them is right!”

The moral of the poem is to trust your totem pole (and read more Kipling!). What's true of tribal lays is also true of programming methodologies. There are at least nine and sixty ways of making programs, and I've tried most of them over the years since I wrote my first line of FORTRAN in 1970. They're all different, but they all work in that they all produce programs that can be loaded and run—once the programmer figures out how to follow a particular method and use the tools that go with it.

Still, although all these programming techniques work, they are not interchangeable, and what works for one programming language or tool set will not apply to another programming language or tool set. In 1977, I learned to program in a language called APL (A Programming Language; how profound!) by typing in lines of code and watching what each one did. That was the way APL worked: ...