SemiOT: Mourning for Classic Computing

It was thus said that the Great Iggy Drougge once stated: It really depends upon what you mean by ``print statement.'' Yes, the language specification for BASIC (whatever specification exists) does include a language element called ``PRINT'' (just as Pascal has WRITE and WRITELN) and technically, the C language doesn't have such an element. But ... and this is the crucial part here ... if you are programming under ANSI C (and most C compilers, if not all, in active use today) you have the Standard C Library (if it doesn't come with an implementation of the Standard C Library, it can't be considered an ANSI C compiler), of which you then have the library function printf(). And yes, if you consider ANSI C as a whole, then it *does* have a language element for printing; it just happens to be written in C [1]. Now, whether you actually *use* the Standard C Library is up to you. But for starting out, you can consider C having a language element for printing [2]. Now, getting back to your assertion that Assembly has no print statement---that's a straw man if I ever saw one. It really depends upon the platform you are programming for if there is a system facility for printing. On the Amiga, you have RawDoFmt() (or rather, _LVORawDoFmt(a6) where a6 contains the Exec library base address) for printing purposes, and it's flexible enough to print to files, the screen, memory, serial port, parallel port, or where ever you want the data to go: move.w #32,-(a7) pea name(pc) lea msg(pc),a0 move.l a7,a1 lea stuffChar(pc),a2 lea buffer(pc),a3 move.l _execbase,a6 jsr _LVORawDoFmt(a6) add.w #10,a7 ... stuffChar move.b d0,(a3)+ rts ... name dc.b 'Sean Conner',0 msg dc.b 'Hi, I am %s and I am %d years old',0 buffer dcb.b 4096,0 Under Unix, you actually have access to the Standard C Library for assembly programming (you just link it in). So there, you can do (for an Intel based Unix, using Nasm): push dword #34 push dword #name push dword #msg call _printf add esp,12 name db 'Sean Conner',0 msg db 'Hi, I am %s and I am %d years old',0 Not exactly rocket science here. And you might say that you're just programming AmigaOS or Unix in an awkward way, but no matter what, if you're not used to Assembly, it's going to look awkward. And you don't learn assembly in a vaccum---you learn for a particular chip on a particular system and you will generally have documentation for doing I/O. You might not have formatted I/O, but you can generally do I/O and part and parcel of learning assembly is learning how to do things like divide/multiply by 10 (for decimal output), or give up on that and learn how to read octal or hex *real* quick 8-) From your messages, I get the feeling you don't like Assembly all that much ... -spc (I'll claim the Amiga code as on topic 8-) [1] The Lattice C compiler for the Amiga will scan the format string given to printf() and if it determines that it can be handled by the Exec routine RawDoFmt() (which doesn't support floating point or some of the more esoteric aspects of printf()) then that routine will be called instead of the Lattice C implemenation of printf(). Exec is written in 68k Assembly (or at least it was when I was activetly writing code on the Amiga) so that's why I mention this exception. [2] You can write your own printf() routine and it will mask the Standard C Library implementation, but don't expect your program to work, as that invokes undefined behavior. [3] You have to provide a routine that will be called per character to do the actual I/O, but that can be as simple as stuffing the character into memory somewhere, much like sprintf() in C.