ASM Community

Hi, all!

While surfing, i came across this page.
HLA Papers, Tutorials, and Documentation



I've startled.
I know it's not new but not for me, although i'm not a beginner in asm programming.

If someone of you has experience in HLA programming,
please tell me its advantage and disadvantage.
Is it more for teaching or for advanced programmers?

Also could you, please post some simple example with compiled .exe
I'd like to look deep inside the code that it generate.

Thank you much!

The only advantages I see is the ability to use OS calls... that is all a high-level language ever was.

HLA has been designed by Randall Hyde for eductional purpose. The stranger
thing in it, is that in "HLA", the "A" stands for "Assembly". In fact, HLA
is nothing but a Pascal front end to MASM. Is it good or not for teaching
something in US Universities, i don't know.

The only thing i am about sure is that, with it, the guys can write Pascal
and say: "Great, i am writing Assembly!...".

The regular argument of Randy, when he is attacked with this, is that the
"Up-Down" process in Asm learning is much easier and faster than direct
learning of the true thing. All this is based on the pre-build concept
that Assembly is difficult to learn and that HLLs are easy to learn. This
was true in Dos world. At my opinion, actually, with APIs calls, Flat
memory, good RADs and good Tuts we now have, this assumption is no longer
true (or at least, much less true).

If you want a quick start in Asm world, it is possible, even with no HLL
previously known at all. Just take a look at the different available
Assemblers and Tuts and learn by doing, this is the quick way, at my
opinion. Having previously knowledge of programming with any HLL will
of course help, but it seems to me that, if a pure beginner wants to
learn some HLL just before strating Asm, this will be some waste ot time.

Assemblers:

SpAsm: http://betov.free.fr/SpAsm.html
MASM: see at Iczelion Page
NASM: http://nasm.2y.net/
FASM: http://omega.im.uj.edu.pl/~grysztar/

Many good Tuts and Demos at Iczelion, Betov, Test Departement, Ron Thomas
pages.

Ron: http://www.rbthomas.freeserve.co.uk/
TD: http://www.crahkob.com/td

For Asm32 Tutorials i have open a very new Page at:

http://betov.free.fr/Asm32.html
(very new, but growing fast and well -thanks to all contributors- ;))


You will find right down there, a link to the good Paul Carter Tutorial, that
may be helpfull if you come form C hell.

At Randall Hyde Page, you will find too a 16 Bits Assembly Tutorial (AoA-16)
that is out of date, but with tons of good and usefull infos.


To end with HLA, i have never seen any Application written with it. In the
better case, if we suppose that it makes Asm learning process easier, its
goal would only be to introduce studients to MASM (the worst available
Assembler) programming. So forth, we can suppose that we will never seen any
significant Application really written with HLA. Anyway, with a Bison Pre-Parser
we can expect that the compiling process would be far too slow for real App
building.


Betov.