High Level Assembly

dunric writes "Randall Hyde has developed a programming language called High Level Assembly (HLA). It is a great way for new programmers to develop applications for both Windows and Linux. It works with a variety of assemblers, including Gas, Fasm, Masm and others. The website for Randy's HLA is located at: http://webster.cs.ucr.edu/"

FAQ

[Fulkkari]

...is something you should probably read. Link here [ucr.edu].

Interesting project, but quite useless for us that prefer portability.

Relax, it's a teaching tool...

[Cragen]

HLA was created to help make teaching assembly language easy (for both instructors and students). This paper describes the features of HLA that make it suitable for teaching assembly language programming.

Kinda like MIPS/SPim. Assembly: The Anti-Java language. (Haven't decided if that is a comment or compliment...)

Oldbie.

Wow that's gross

[p3d0]

Take a look at the sample programs [ucr.edu].

HLA and Art of Assembly

[Dayflowers]

This is hardly news to anyone. If my memory doesn't fail me, that has been around for at least two years. And if you were ever into assembly or even just curious, you were bound to stumble uppon the Art of Assembly (his book, a must read when learning assembly) and his site. Its not like HLA was any secret of even hidden in some obscure webpage...

Randall Hyde's long-term project ...

[Chromodromic]

Actually, HLA ain't nothing new, and if you've been doing any hanging out on comp.lang.asm then you've seen his name popping up on posts about every single day, several times per day, promoting HLA and helping newbies for years now.

I downloaded his book, "Art of Assembly Language" (avail. at No Starch, http://www.nostarch.com/) a couple of years ago before it had been published by No Starch and it's well written, still available for free either HTML [ucr.edu] , or PDF [ucr.edu].

If you're using Windoze then it's definitely worth checking out the excellent RadASM [visualassembler.com] assembly language IDE for Windows, which is itself written in assembly, and also supports HLA. Randall Hyde devotes a chapter somewhere, either in his book or on his site, I can't remember, to configuring and using RadASM.

One of the posts has questioned the value of teaching assembly to newbies, but I think there's a huge value for serious students. It's hard to appreciate garbage collection, for one, until you've had to pick up your own memory trash. But more importantly, most compilers out there output to some intermediary assembly language, and understanding the inner workings of your processor, your compiler and your own programs is one essential difference between being, well, a hack and being really, really good. There are other differences, to be sure, but that's one.

I haven't been a huge fan of HLA myself for various, and admittedly completely arbitrary reasons. But Randall Hyde has put megatons of work into his stuff, doing some extremely impressive things, and he's always ready and willing to be helpful on the newsgroups, so if you have an interest then I would probably go to his site and to comp.lang.asm before I went anywhere else. Anyone stands to learn a ton.

Re:High Level Assembly (HLA)

[Per Wigren]

As the other poster said: Insightful, not Funny.

For example SmartEiffel [loria.fr] compiles Eiffel-code to assembly-like C-code and then compiles the C-code to executable code using an ANSI-C compiler. Smart and efficient way to make a new compiler produce extremly fast code and be crossplatform without an extra effort.

High Level Assembler for JVM use

[astrojetsonjr]

If you are looking for a High Level Assmebler that generates Java Byte Code look at Jamaica. It allows Java control structures around the byte code. It is simple to use and has some very good documentation. Jamaica (on the Judoscript site) [judoscript.com]