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High Level Assembly

Posted by Hemos on from the for-the-insane-or-hardcore dept.

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/"

3 of 53 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Relax, it's a teaching tool... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting
    Exactly like SAL (Simple Assembly Language). MIPS/Spim is a processor/assembly language (MIPS) and an assembler and emulator (Spim). Spim is a great tool in itself. SAL was added onto Spim as a teaching tool.

    We (Goodman, et al) designed SAL back in 1990 when the CS354 Computer Organization and Programming was moved from VAX. I was a TA at the time and added the SAL code onto Spim.

  2. Re:Teaching? Yes. Applications? Er.. why? by Monkelectric · · Score: 3, Interesting
    That's the question nobody can answer. I have quite alot of experience with the author, Randall Hyde, and can tell you in no uncertain terms he beyond a brilliant programmer. He also suffers from some kind of pathology such as megalomania or manic depressive disorder.

    Nobody can answer the question -- why do you need a language that has none of the advantadges of assembley, AND none of the advantadges of a higher level language?

    --

    Religion is a gateway psychosis. -- Dave Foley

  3. Structured assembly language not new by waterbear · · Score: 3, Interesting

    HLA looks like a complex programming environment.

    Assuming a common role of assembler, to fine-tune a critical smallish bit of code, I can see the convenience of having a higher level than normal of language constructs. It can make the flow of logic more transparent, (e.g. nestable conditional blocks, loops with readable criteria, repeat-until, do-while, switch/case structure, etc).

    On the other hand, providing this kind of pseudo-high level language structure in assembler programs has been around a long time, and can be done more simply. I still have an assembler macro library around that in its original version (circulated on 80s bbs networks) did this for at least some early versions of MASM and TASM.

    (Most of the identifiers would probably have to be changed for compatibility with newer assemblers because it used non-standard initial characters to enable constructs looking a bit like (ignore the 1--- 's, they just adjust formatting in the Slashdot editor)

    1---- .if (test)

    1---- .orif (another test)

    1------ (whatever code)

    1---- .else

    1-------- .while (yet another test)

    1----------- (whatever other code)

    1-------- .endwhile

    1---- .endif

    and suchlike constructs).

    As I first read it, it was a macro library carrying a by-line from 'Jim Holtman, 1982'. It was not very big, the whole thing (even after some more macros for other logic-extensions were added)came to an include-file size of no more than about 10 kb.

    Maybe it's not clear why anything bigger would be needed.

    -wb-