A recent finding on the
internet relating to
Assembly that I liked
very much concerns HLA
(High Level Assembly) and
Hide (HLA Ide).
Here are the main links:
Art of Assembly Language
Programming and HLA by
Randall Hyde is a very
clear and complete course
about programming in HLA
by HLA's designer Randall
Hyde.
It is a truly clear and
complete introduction to
programming, easily the
best and most complete
that I have read, and also
quite interesting and
instructive about
programming in case you
never were to program in
HLA itself but want to
learn a lot about
programming a computer
(running 32 bits Windows
or Linux) on its most
fundamental levels.
The
website of Randall Hyde
is very extensive, and has
lot of excellent
documentation concerning
Assembly. As a
website, it is not as
slick as some, but for
intellectual content about
programming and Assembly
it can have few if any
peers.
Sevag Krikorian's Hide IDE: HLA
exists approximately 8
years and is still in
development, but there are
two very nice IDEs for it,
namely
Ketil Olsen's RadASM ,
that has the advantage
over Hide that you can
program many assemblers in
it, and
Sevag Krikorian's Hide IDE,
that is especially for HLA
(and uses fasm as its
assembler).
All of this is very
interesting and very
powerful, for HLA is
undoubtedly the most
comprehensive programming
language I have programmed
in, and it is certainly
better in many ways,
including documentation,
than what Microsoft and
Borland had to offer
(respectively
masm and tasm).
And personally I believe
HLA to have great
perspectives if it finds
sufficiently many
intelligent users and
developers.
Apart from its very
impressive capacities as a
language and compiler, HLA
has some other major
advantages:
-
HLA is extra-ordinarily
well documented;
-
it comes with the complete
source-code for
everything;
-
and everything in it is
completely free:
"free as in public
domain", as Randall Hyde
put it himself.
For more, see
Randall Hyde's website.
There is also a good
Wikipedia article about
High Level Assembly
that explains its
possibilities well.
Note
27 Jul 2007:
I have added a
question-mark in the
title but otherwise left
the text unchanged. My
reasons for doing so can
be gleaned from
BAP6,
BAP7 and
BAP9 - and one
should also realize that
HLA at present is far
less developed than e.g.
RosAsm or GoAsm, which
means that the latter
are far better choices
for novices in assembly.
Also, it
should be remarked here
that many seasoned
assembler-programmers
insist that HLA is
not an assembler at
all, but a pre-parser
that outputs code that
can be turned to an
executable by a real
assembler, like Fasm or
Masm.
I will
leave that discussion
alone for the moment,
but what is both true
and quite important for
novices, is that RosAsm
and GoAsm + EasyCode (or
for that matter Masm +
MasmEd) have been
developed to a much
higher extent than HLA +
Hide.
Also,
the best tutorials for
modern assembly that I
have found (during 2
months of searching) are
for RosAsm.
Hence,
if you don't know
assembly, HLA - whatever
merits it may have in
ten years time, when it
may be well developed
and properly debugged -
does not seem to be the
right choice for novices
to assembly.
