[Coco] 6X09 Assembly Newbies.

[Theodore Evans (Alex)]

On Jan 16, 2004, at 2:08 PM, Robert Gault wrote:

> jimcox at miba51.com wrote:
>> On Fri, 16 Jan 2004 17:30:07 -0500
>> <snip>
>> How about some suggestions for assembly exercises that would 
>> challenge us newbies? Jim
>
> The first lesson for C seems to be print to the screen "Hello world." 
> Why not try that both in Disk Basic and assembly? See how far you get, 
> post the results of your progress, and ask questions about problems 
> you run into.
>
> That will give you a very good idea of the difference between high and 
> low level languages.

I guess I could start putting a few together.  Somethings are easier or 
harder depending on whether you are doing them under BASIC or OS-9.  
Which one would you all like to start with and would you like me to 
assume that you are using (Disk) EDTASM+, asm, rma, or what for your 
assembler?  Most likely I would plagiarize any problems from some of 
the texts I have here.  You could start with "Hello World" if you like, 
but it probably isn't really a good starting point considering that I/O 
can sometimes be non-trivial issue.  Consider that for "Hello World" 
you might call a library routine, or do a direct screen write (probably 
not the way you want to do it if you are going to do it under OS-9).  I 
think something like finding the integer square root of a 16-bit value 
might be a better place to start.  If you are looking for a simple 
algorithm to start with you can base it on:
  x**2=sum(n=1|n=x)(2n-1)
Maybe you could implement a bubble sort to sort the data in the screen 
area of BASIC.  This has the advantage of looking neat when you run it 
as you see all of the characters moving around.