D and the world

[Sean Kelly]

Walter Bright wrote:
> 
> Back in the 80's when people wrote a lot of assembler, MASM had a fairly 
> powerful preprocessor. Lots of people essentially invented their own 
> languages, that preprocessed down to assembler. Microsoft shipped one of 
> these as an include file with MASM.
> 
> Lots of people found it impenetrable. A friend of mine had a lot of 
> difficulty with it, and finally resolved the problems by assembling the 
> code with MASM, running OBJ2ASM on the result, and then using OBJ2ASM's 
> output as his new source code. *Then* he understood what was going on <g>.

I'll admit that this is why I'm not a huge fan of Randy Hyde's "High 
Level Assembly."  I picked up his book as a way to learn x86 ASM (having 
only done 68000 ASM in the past), and the HLA abstraction just confused 
things for me.  I ended up grabbing the Intel IA-32 docs and reading 
those instead.


Sean