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x86 Assembly Language
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idykenano
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Sep 9, 2008, 01:20 PM
 
Greetings.

I'm a college student, blah blah blah, due to my chemistry research I'm pretty adept with terminal but I'm just beginning with xcode.
At any rate, my systems programming class uses C assembly language and the professor is somewhat dimwitted about Linux/Unix/Mac/anything other than XP (which is disappointing for a CS professor, anyway). He wants us to use MS Visual Studio because that's all he knows how to use, but I'm without another operating system on my macbook. I can do my assignments in campus computer labs, but it seems silly to do that when I'm running on Intel architecture already.
Any advice/tips for me? I've already done Python, Java, Perl, and C++ from my trust terminal, I'd hate to give up now.
     
Big Mac
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Sep 9, 2008, 01:30 PM
 

"The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground." TJ
     
Dork.
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Sep 9, 2008, 01:37 PM
 
You can't get cheap edu pricing on XP and Parallels or VMWare?
     
idykenano  (op)
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Sep 9, 2008, 06:16 PM
 
Through my school the only software discount I can get is $100 for the Vista upgrade.

Through JourneyEd I can get XP full version for $200, and through Apple I can get the academic version of Fusion for $40 with 2-3 week shipping.

If there's no way to do it through the unix backside of my macbook, I'd rather use the computer lab computers for my assignments than spend $200+. I'm a pretty cheap person, sometimes it's a necessity.
     
mduell
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Sep 9, 2008, 06:31 PM
 
nasm is available for OS X.
     
Chuckit
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Sep 9, 2008, 06:36 PM
 
You can absolutely program in assembly from the command line. The GCC assembler is called as.
Chuck
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gassyandy
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Sep 19, 2008, 11:10 AM
 
Maybe it is time to switch places with the prof, he obviously does not know
about the virtue of C programming. perhaps for Christmas you should get him
'The C Programming Language' by K & R, it is a white book with blue letters
used to be the BIBLE of C programmers, what the hack happened!!
     
Tomchu
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Sep 19, 2008, 02:20 PM
 
There's no such thing as "C assembly language". You're either programming in C, or assembly.

That said, you can do either in OS X. If you guys are just programming command-line utilities in C, you can write them so that they compile cleanly and work properly on both Windows and any *nix flavour (OS X included). I've gotten by using my Mac for everything in my CS program -- except for the occasional course where we had to use Visio, or MS SQL Server, or whatnot.
     
Arkham_c
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Oct 7, 2008, 01:21 PM
 
The K&R book above was what I started with when I first learned C. What you have to understand is how a compiler works.

1) User writes code in C (or whatever)
2) Compiler turns C into assembly
3) assembler turns assembly into bytecode (instructions, generally 32-bit or 64-bit "words" that can be loaded)

You can easily skip step 1 and go to step 2 directly. x86 is actually a pretty crappy processor for learning assembly since it has all these giant meta-instructions that you wouldn't see in a simpler architecture. You can ignore them of course and pretend you're coding for an 8086.
Mac Pro 2x 2.66 GHz Dual core, Apple TV 160GB, two Windows XP PCs
     
   
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