Comments on: Lecture 1 | Programming Paradigms (Stanford)

By: Octalnet

Octalnet — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 12:18:30 +0000

Excellent, except …
Excellent, except one thing. He says that C and variants compile to assembly code. It might have been a slip-up, but it compiles to machine code which can then be represented using assembly mnemonics.

By: Octalnet

Octalnet — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 12:18:29 +0000

No, that’s not …
No, that’s not accurate either. A compiler converts C/++ to optimized machine code. It would be completely dumb to convert to an assembly source, then assemble.

By: hyhu84

hyhu84 — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 12:18:29 +0000

any data structure …
any data structure or algorithm course.

By: decoran234

decoran234 — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 12:18:29 +0000

Are you sure? This …
Are you sure? This guy is a professor, just saying

By: MajDigi

MajDigi — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 12:18:29 +0000

That’s not accurate …
That’s not accurate. Most compilers will convert the C/++ to ASM, and then send it to the assembler, which converts it once more to machine code.

By: medoelkorsan

medoelkorsan — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 12:18:28 +0000

assembly language …
assembly language can’t addressed to be higher as long as we call it low level language it is just another way to represent machine language ..

By: MasterMyztry

MasterMyztry — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 12:18:28 +0000

He does seem …
He does seem confused about assembly vs. machine code.
Assembly is the human readable representation of the machine instructions. This is important as a single assembly instruction can result in different machine opcodes. For example a relative branch instruction may be encoded as a short branch (with few bits address distance) or a long branch (up to the full address bit size).
Machine code is a fixed finite language. Assembly is a ‘higher level’ compiled language.

By: eriksensei2

eriksensei2 — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 12:18:28 +0000

Care to explain …
Care to explain what difference asm vs. machine code would make to the optimization of the code? Perhaps you should phone the gcc maintainers about their ‘dumb’ compiler that allows you to do stuff like gcc -O2 -S -c foo.c.

By: mogisfubared

mogisfubared — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 12:18:28 +0000

Assembly IS machine …
Assembly IS machine code, it just replaces the opcodes with mnemonics and converts the addresses and values from binray.

By: bobbygnosis

bobbygnosis — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 12:18:27 +0000

For clarification …
For clarification of Assembly and Machine Codes go ahead and read “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenence.” Pirsig discusses rather a lot about the relationships between programs, machines and humans. More importantly he goes into detail about the implications ragarding the confusions between Assemblies and Machine Codes. This is a subtle and very interesting problem being indirectly addressed here.

Does that make sense?