Hex! I started with Hex machine code on the SC/MP in 1977
C4 = LDI = Load ImmediateNot long after, I was introduced to a High Level Language ->
NIBLhttp://www.dos4ever.com/SCMP/SCMP.html#NIBLNeither of them involved writing more than a few K of code, but
that was all the memory there was in the world at that time. Well,
that was what my boss told me.
NIBL was surprisingly good, the indirect '@' operator was demon
for creating useful integer (8-bit) variables and (best of all) banging
or reading bytes in memory-mapped I/O, it is so nearly a favourite.
Lean but effective, designed for the task it performed.
>>>>off topic<<<<<
SC/MP was afaik the first multiprocessor micro architecture sold to
the public. I still have the demo card in the attic. It is neat.
For a long long time it looked like being the last of the multiprocessors,
but Casey Powell at Sequent picked that up with a successor to the
SC/MP, the NS32000 family in 1983/4.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sequent_Computer_SystemsSadly, it was at that time very much an Intel world, and Sequent
switched to them for the next design iteration, although Casey
told me that it was a backward step in many ways.
Now Intel and AMD are enjoying the fun of multiprocessing - the devil
is in the software segmentation. 32 years ago, that was also true.
>>>>back again<<<<<
Fave language has to be
FORTH, the implementation on the
Jupiter Ace. Fell in love with that, bigtime. Wrote some very
very unreadable code, too!
Unfavourite is
C++. Just as I was getting the hang of C, not
a great love, but useful enough, along comes this Object OOP stuff
that cluttered up the scenery with fuzzy concepts and
h u g ecompiled code. Most of the time (when coding) I was happily doing
similar applications in Assembler for Z80/NSC800 and COP400 single-
chip micro - in about a tenth of the ROM needed by the compilers.
Of course, it all had to fit inside 64K, or 640K, or less than 1K on
some COP400 low cost versions (like 50c in volume).
Today code is so big that different approaches are clearly needed,
guess I ought to learn something more useful!
<sigh>