On 30/10/2015 08:48 AM, scott wrote:
>> Yeah, I haven't done a lot with x86 assembly, but with 40 years of
>> backwards-compatibility, it's pretty complicated. And ugly to start
>> with, it seems! (Well, it was originally designed for low-cost pocket
>> calculators, not supercomputers!)
>
> You could probably explain the vast majority of ARM assembler in a
> single newsgroup post. The syntax is very simple, and the mnemonics are
> mostly obvious or very easy to remember. You're free to use any register
> for source or either of the destinations, and all registers are the same
> bit-width.

The M68k has 8 "data registers" and 8 "address registers", which you can 
freely use for any purpose (although the address registers are somewhat 
optimised for holding addresses).

x86 has... what... FOUR main registers? And the FPU register stack... 
which is also the MMX registers... but then a separate set of XMM 
registers added for the SSE instruction set?... but then SSE2 made them 
wider, so there's XMMX... WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON?!?!

I gather ARM is quite a popular architecture. I don't know whether 
that's because there's readily available chips and IP-cores, because 
it's low-power, or because it's really easy to program...

> Someone needs to write a wrapper to go on top of the Android SDK that is
> a) easy to install and b) uses an easy language that allows you to just
> start writing commands to draw stuff without tons of boiler-plate code.

Meh. Just use Haskell. ;-)

(Seriously, people occasionally ask about cross-compiling to ARM. I 
can't think of any other reason why somebody would do that. Apparently 
it even *works*, vaguely...)

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