On Tue, Jan 17, 2017 at 01:41:26AM -0500, Evan Koblentz via vcf-midatlantic wrote:
After posting my assembly-for-newbs question, it occurred to me that perhaps I should be asking this instead: with no experience other than LOGO and then BASIC, which (period 1980s) language should I learn next?
High level languages aren't great preparation for assembly since there purpose was to hide the fiddly details you have to worry about in assembly. If you start with C then go to PDP-11 assembly you will understand more some of the choices that they made with the language. The big advantage of learning an assembly language is you will much better understand how a computer actually works than you will get from using high level languages. Some processor instruction sets are easier to program in since they are more symetric and have more operations that can be done with one instruction. What you go to next is more what you wish to accomplish or what strikes your fancy.
Was it normal to go from BASIC directly to assembly (is BASIC enough preparation), or were people better off getting some in-between experience with a language such as Pascal or something else?
I think this was common. You would start learning assmelby and making little routines to call from Basic to do things that couldn't be done in Basic or were too slow. I went from Basic to assmebly to PL/1 to Pascal to C...
Keep in mind that my natural aptitude is liberal arts, not math. :)
Its not really math skills but attention to details and solving puzzles. How do I string together the operations the CPU can do to accomplish what I want. You need a little math when you need to multiply on processors without an instruction for that. Single stepping instructions will help in the beginning so you can see where your understaning of how the instuctions work disagrees with how they really work.