[Info-vax] Dvorak on Itanic

[Richard B. Gilbert]

glen herrmannsfeldt wrote:
> Tom Linden <tom at kednos.company> wrote:
> (big snip)
>  
>> I have worked with quite a variety of instructions over the last 40 years
>> and there is none better than VAX, IMO.  As for risc Mips was probably the
>> best of that ilk, Power PC is a hybrid instruction set and is quite well
>> designed, specifically they considered how to run legacy code as well.  The
>> alpha designers were quite cavalier, one even told me once when I  
>> criticised
> 
> For assembly programming, VAX was pretty nice.  But not so
> many people do (or did when VAX was popular) assembly programming.
> 
> -- glen

Very few people program in assembler any longer.  Usually an optimizing 
compiler can do as well as, or better than, hand optimized code!

The higher level languages allow you to concentrate on solving the 
problem rather than the nuts and bolts!

Some of us LEARNED programming in assembler; sometimes there wasn't 
anything else!  SDS 900 series assembler was my first programming 
language.  I learned COBOL later but never really used it.  I taught 
myself Fortran from Daniel D. McCracken's book "A Guide to Fortran IV 
Programming" and then used it to make a decent living for many years, 
coding for people who hadn't a clue about computers or programming but 
needed the results.