A place for assembler in structured programming

Abstract

Today, with the thrust being made with structured programming, questions arise concerning the relevance of assembler language code. The purpose of this paper is to defend assembler language programming by showing its relevance and to show how we present the course with a structured programming emphasis. In the sections that follows, we show the relevance of assembler through two examples of the use of assembler language coding. These examples show two extremes, one involves the development of a theoretical result in mathematics, the other shows the use of assembler in a commercial environment. Section 3 provides an overview to our approach in the course and how we view the role of assemblers in structured programming. Section 4 illustrates our approach to programming assignments and section 5 describes our approach to evaluating assignments.