http://www.osnews.com/story/11038/HLA_The_High_Level_Assembly_Programming_Language Exploring the Future of Computing en-us Copyright 2001-2009, David Adams adam+nospam@osnews.com Mon, 09 Nov 2009 03:02:01 GMT http://www.osnews.com/images/osnews.gif http://www.osnews.com http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? I'm not sure by what criteria he considers his creation to be assembly language. Looking at the example in the article it looked more like a variant of BASIC meets C/C++. I don't mean to denigrate his considerable efforts, but it does appear to be a problem looking for a solution. Thu, 30 Jun 2005 12:36:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Im confused. What is HLA supposed to be? What does it have to do with assembly? Thu, 30 Jun 2005 12:46:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? I think they are all just macros that are replaced with assembly before compilation. A bit like Microsofts Macro Assembler (MASM) really.

Its used as a learning tool. Input and Output is pretty tough on assembler so the developer created some easy macros so beginners can play with assembly instruction whilst reading and writing the screen easily. Thu, 30 Jun 2005 12:50:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? The things we can see on the net! X-D
That's C with a touch of Python and Pascal. Oh boy....

X-D Thu, 30 Jun 2005 12:52:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? What I find very funny is that they haven't chosen to use a C like syntax for the strings for example.

Frankly what's so good about ("text" nl) instead of "textn".. Thu, 30 Jun 2005 13:12:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? HLA simply allows high level structures in assembly. It is to teach you assembly but slowing going from high level instructures to pure assembly. It allows you to compile programs written in partial assembly, and partial high level syntax. Just read the manual about it. Thu, 30 Jun 2005 13:12:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? This is retarded. Seriously. Thu, 30 Jun 2005 13:15:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Do a bit more research before you post. Please.

I've looked at HLA before, though I haven't had the opportunity to create any sample programs with it. It was principally designed as a teaching language for assembly programmers. Therefore it comes with a number of high-range constructs to help programmers get started early out. However if you follow through the HLA course, you learn to work with less high-level constructs and more raw assembly, until at the end you're using assembly on its own.

It really is a very good way to teach assembly.

With regard to post about the C syntax, take another look. Bar the preprocessor declarations, the syntax is heavily derived from Pascal.

One thing I disagree with is the idea of using it as a general purpose programming language, it wasn't designed for that, and while I can't say for sure, I'd imagine programmers would run into awkward obstacles once they moved onto the development of larger, non-trivial applications.

For people looking to use HLA to learn assembly, consider the "Art of Assembly" book: http://webster.cs.ucr.edu/AoA/index.html Thu, 30 Jun 2005 13:53:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Stop b*tching about it. It is what it is, and if you don't like it, that's your problem. Thu, 30 Jun 2005 14:02:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Chill out dudes! Check out my assembler: http://betov.free.fr/RosAsm.html

It's hundred times better!!! Thu, 30 Jun 2005 14:03:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Pardon, but there is only one high-level assembler, and it is called "ANSI C". Thu, 30 Jun 2005 14:09:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? > the syntax is heavily derived from Pascal.

Well being heavily derived from a dead language is not a good idea in my book.
Even universities are ditching Pascal and going to Java for teaching computer science, so students won't even know Pascal to help them.. Thu, 30 Jun 2005 14:14:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? But, can you hook it up to the .Net library on Windows?
Probably not.
I used to love assembly, but it's a bit hard to justify using this for anything other then as a learning tool. Possibly a file copy utility program that runs on a scheduler. For a business programmer it's hard to find an algorithm that would justify assembler these days.

A game developer might find this interesting.
But, then you're stuck on just one platform( x86 ) and one OS because the librarys are tied to the os. Thu, 30 Jun 2005 14:32:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? HLA is C. Cross-platform, fast. What more can you expect? Thu, 30 Jun 2005 14:41:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Actually Pascal is alive and well in the form of Borland Delphi, which is used to develop a significant number of Windows apps (particularly in the bespoke world). Having used both Delphi and Java in two separate jobs, I can tell you Delphi is the far easier to read, code in, and use. The downside is the small library that comes with it, particularly in comparison with Java, and the smaller community due to it being a commerical product.

The Delphi IDE particularly shines when developing GUI apps. Idea/J is the only Java IDE that's equivalent. Further, Delphi tends to be a lot more forgiving of programmers bundling stuff into the event loop: multi-threading is still necessary for the big stuff, but more often then not you can get away with it. With regard to the underlying toolkits, Swing is more flexible than Delphi's VCL and, should you wish to code a GUI by hand, is probably the better choice.

With regard to the choice of syntax, it's well known in programming circles that Pascal has one of the most readable syntaxes out there, while still being close enough to C for programmers to make the jump. It's an obvious choice for a teaching language. Thu, 30 Jun 2005 14:53:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Actually, it's designed to allow users write x86 assembly, which isn't particularly portable. It may be a high-level assembler, but it's still assembly you're writing, and that's always tied to a particular CPU Thu, 30 Jun 2005 14:56:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? from the example you may think that it looks nothing like assembly, simply because the example in the article exclusively uses the high-level libraries.

i have actually written a program recently (designed to interact as a sort of mini-plugin for Opera) in a few hundred lines of HLA, and about 90% of it consisted of more "obviously" assembly instructions such as JMP/MOV/CMP etc. the other 10% called the very handy libraries allowing me to get the commandline parameters without any pain about -- i think HLA is an excellent language.

try to understand: there is *nothing* stopping you from writing 100% pure, totally bare-metal assembly within the HLA framework. it's just that where you want or need, you can also take advantage of some high-level constructs. in my case, commandline parsing. who wants to write that in low-level code for the thousandth time?? you can even sneak in some near regex-like string parsing too.

in short, HLA is a fantastic language. the way it's designed allows you to start your entire program at a relatively high level and then, as you gradually get more familiar, you can start interleaving it with progressively lower and lower level code. then do what i did, and write the interesting parts in assembly, leaving the drudgery and bits that just simply don't need it for the excellent library. Thu, 30 Jun 2005 14:57:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? I still prefer the good ol nasm and a text-editor. Thu, 30 Jun 2005 15:12:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? To say this HLA concept is stupid only serves to detract from other ideas which are mearly stupid. Thu, 30 Jun 2005 16:51:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Some comments and answers to various posts in this thread:

Andy Ross:>>>>>>>>>>
I'm not sure by what criteria he considers his creation to be assembly language. Looking at the example in the article it looked more like a variant of BASIC meets C/C++. I don't mean to denigrate his considerable efforts, but it does appear to be a problem looking for a solution. Thu, 30 Jun 2005 17:07:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? I thought HLA was called C. I am not joking, isn't that how people write C compilers? Thu, 30 Jun 2005 17:16:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? You insecure java/python/ruby fanboys need to get a grip.

99% of electronic devices have assembled code sitting in a ROM right next to the micro. Civilization would come to a screeching halt if you were to remove assembly from the equation.

In a thousand years, do you think that anybody's going to care what software was used to track orders at some company? No. They're going to be ripping EPROMS and flash memory out of everything they can get their hands on in order to find out how the world really worked. Thu, 30 Jun 2005 17:34:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? renoX wrote:>>>>>>>>>>>>>
What I find very funny is that they haven't chosen to use a C like syntax for the strings for example.

Frankly what's so good about ("text" nl) instead of "textn".. Thu, 30 Jun 2005 18:22:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? AtariCheck wrote:>>>>>>>>>
But, can you hook it up to the .Net library on Windows?
Probably not. Thu, 30 Jun 2005 18:23:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Anonymous wrote:>>>>>>>>
I thought HLA was called C. I am not joking, isn't that how people write C compilers? Thu, 30 Jun 2005 18:34:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Is it any good for writing shellcode? Thu, 30 Jun 2005 18:53:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Anonymous wrote:>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Is it any good for writing shellcode? Thu, 30 Jun 2005 19:01:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Not all institutions are moving away from Pascal towards Java as a teaching language. Some, that care about teaching computer science rather than how to use language L, choose languages appropriate for teaching. It is almost always better to use a language that isn't really popular for this purpose.

This is one of the reasons why the University of Glasgow Computing Science department choice Ada back in 1994 as the replacement for Pascal and still uses it today. There were other reasons: language features, availability of compilers for various platforms (gnat helped a lot here!). The same department also uses Haskell, C and Java in teaching but level 1 courses are Ada. Thu, 30 Jun 2005 22:12:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? > Now as to why HLA doesn't support the C escape sequences,
> well, this isn't necessary in *assembly language*.

Well it isn't *necessary* in C too: with the preprocessor and string concatenation, you can write:
#define nl "13"
printf("toto" nl);
instead of "toton", but apparently K&R thought that the escape sequence was a good idea, and I agree with them: relying on string concatenation to build basic strings isn't "nice".

I'm not sure I understand your justification to use a different escape character, if you send a string 'toton' to a C program, it will see 't','o','t','o',,0 and it will work!
No need to have 't','o','t','o','','n',0 passed to the C program!

And about:
> what so good about [cout Thu, 30 Jun 2005 22:38:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Although I must admit my short attentionspan meant I never made it through the introduction of AoA ;-) Thu, 30 Jun 2005 22:40:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? And about:
> what so good about [cout Fri, 01 Jul 2005 03:47:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? The *nice* thing about the fact that HLA does *not* use C's escape character sequence syntax is that it is much easier to create such strings to pass on to other (C) programs and functions that *do* want to see these escape sequences.

I think arguing this is "nice" is quite far fetched.

That is, if you really want to pass the string "hello worldn" to some other code, including the backslash and the n (without them being converted to a newline), then HLA's string syntax is far cleaner.

Can you also give a compelling reason why most people and in most cases want to do stuff like this? Unless in situations like writing a C parser, there is actually no good reason for this, especially in mixed programming environment. The escape sequences in C are immediately translated by the compiler into their ASCII representation (and not by run time hooks in the I/O library), and you must have users with C-escape interpreting eyes if you see a point to pass strings with literal C escapes to e.g. printf.

I have the feeling that you are simply trying to defend some not really helpful ideosyncracies. Fri, 01 Jul 2005 04:00:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Thanks for the toy language. Real developers will stick to something productive like masm, instead of a pathetic sales pitch for your lego masterpiece. Fri, 01 Jul 2005 04:48:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? >>>> ylai replied to:
The *nice* thing about the fact that HLA does *not* use C's escape character sequence syntax is that it is much easier to create such strings to pass on to other (C) programs and functions that *do* want to see these escape sequences.
------

I think arguing this is "nice" is quite far fetched.
>>
Can you also give a compelling reason why most people and in most cases want to do stuff like this?
>>
Unless in situations like writing a C parser, there is actually no good reason for this, especially in mixed programming environment. Fri, 01 Jul 2005 05:09:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Anonymous wrote:>>>>>>>>>>>
Thanks for the toy language. Real developers will stick to something productive like masm, instead of a pathetic sales pitch for your lego masterpiece. Fri, 01 Jul 2005 05:22:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? I'm not sure I see the point you're trying to make.

Sorry, but then you clearly did not understood my point.

Obviously, you seem to believe that C's way of doing character strings is the only way to accomplish the task.

Sorry, this is just a product of your own imagination. Otherwise feel free to literally quote where I suggested this! Maybe you should try to better understand my few paragraphs.

Now since you fail to comprehend the point: It is not about the only way to do certain things. Just bringing the ability to intermix with C is not a good or compelling reason to explicitly avoid the C notation.

But again, you clearly fail to comprehend this as my only complaint, to bring C as reason not to support C escapes. As you wrote yourself:

Then again, what's the big deal with support Pascal-like string rather than C-style strings? If I'd supported C-style strings, then the people on the *other* side of the fence would complain.

Well, this does not sound as a reason why explicitly to avoid C escapes. Or in other word, it is just an arbitrary choice. And then you go on with the readability issue:

C comes in pretty low on the list because of its well-known readability problems. [...] But C's escape sequences are *not* particularly readable [...]

Readability issue is a subjective matter (or better: matter of taste and possibly prior training of the person sitting in front of the computer). Please, again, do not intermix it with C escapes as being technically a bad idea.

And the good reason for supporting C escape sequences in a non-C language is?

I think you forgot what I have wrote at this point. It certainly has advantages for people programming intermixed C with another language. But again, you resort here to the "inverse problem", and avoids the issue that it is simlply not a technical reason not to use the C escape sequence. Fri, 01 Jul 2005 07:00:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? I've used HLA and I generally liked it, the syntax relied a bit too much on parentesis for my liking. the standard library on the other hand was superb, Hla is definately no more a toy assembler than Masm. that said, I rarely touch assembly these days, and judging by the two win x86 assembly boards I sometimes check in on, it seems much less active nowadays. here's hoping it will pick up again. Fri, 01 Jul 2005 07:50:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? How does it deal with side effects of library function calls and higher-level control constructs, e.g. modified registers and flags? Don't they confuse students? Fri, 01 Jul 2005 09:26:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Oh c'mon, it's rather widely known that C doesn't score high on the 'easy-to-read' rankings.
(for that matter I prefer J even, nice and terse, and consistent operator precedence) Fri, 01 Jul 2005 10:21:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Oh c'mon, it's rather widely known that C doesn't score high on the 'easy-to-read' rankings.

That depends heavily on factors like (I mentioned) training, personal "reading taste", and ultimatively the program itself. Perfectly indented FORTRAN77 with tons of goto is not going to score higher on your "easy-to-read" raking, even being less "symbol-loaded" than C. And on the other hand, 2/3 level loops is also not making an equivalent Pascal code more readable than Fortran 95 with direct array assignments.

There is simply no language XY => unreadable logic. Also arguing that assembly, even HLA is easier to read comes very close to a joke.

But all this is simply irrelevant for the discussion. There is plainly no technical reason to avoid C escapes, and attempting to say that this is needed for string passing is plainly not true. Niche such as C parser is certainly not the typical application for HLA. Fri, 01 Jul 2005 10:35:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Have a look at the german documentation:
http://www.menuetos.org/appl/sp.pdf

and the in english written side at
http://web.archive.org/web/20030413081814/www.goosee.com/menuetos/
http://web.archive.org/web/20040219044801/www.goosee.com/menuetos/

Sphinx C-- is a C language compined with ASM. Or mostly ASM with C like macros or what ever it is. Fri, 01 Jul 2005 11:20:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? not quite sure why you're so hung up on C escape sequences... i also don't see you actually give a technical reason you think they should be preferred - which isn't terribly surprising, as there isn't one. it's just style. if you can offer a technical reason c-style escape sequences are better i'd be rather intrigued. Fri, 01 Jul 2005 12:21:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Nimble asked:>>>>>>>>>>>
How does it deal with side effects of library function calls and higher-level control constructs, e.g. modified registers and flags? Don't they confuse students? Fri, 01 Jul 2005 16:29:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? ylai wrote:>>>>>>>>
I think you forgot what I have wrote at this point. It certainly has advantages for people programming intermixed C with another language. But again, you resort here to the "inverse problem", and avoids the issue that it is simlply not a technical reason not to use the C escape sequence. Fri, 01 Jul 2005 16:38:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Ylai responded to:>>>>>>>>.
Oh c'mon, it's rather widely known that C doesn't score high on the 'easy-to-read' rankings.

...with...

That depends heavily on factors like (I mentioned) training, personal "reading taste", and ultimatively the program itself.
>>>>
Perfectly indented FORTRAN77 with tons of goto is not going to score higher on your "easy-to-read" raking, even being less "symbol-loaded" than C. Fri, 01 Jul 2005 17:00:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? C escape sequences are ugly, jumbled in like that with everything else. I'm GLAD he chose not to use them, and it's not like they WON'T be translated to whatever they need to be translated to when the asm is parsed and linked (remember, we don't "compile" assembler). Technical reasons aside, giving novice student programmers clear, readable code is MUCH more compelling than any interoperability.

C++ reuses the bitshift "" operators because, conceptually, they seemed the best way to express the idea of shifting ANY data into a stream or from a stream to a variable. So, when you overload them for your custom made unions, structs, objects or whatevers, you preserve the symbolic pattern of "into" and "out of". Others would have chosen differently, that's fair.

--JM Fri, 01 Jul 2005 17:19:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? not quite sure why you're so hung up on C escape sequences.

It is simply because I do not get the logic why easier interfacing with C is supposed the reason to not do strings in C syntax.

.. i also don't see you actually give a technical reason you think they should be preferred

If you do not stop at my first sentence, you should noticed that I made it very clear: There are obviously none. It is simply a matter of choice and not for some objective/technical reason, as it was stated. Sat, 02 Jul 2005 02:00:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? I'm a little confused as to what the most recent documentation is for AoA? Is it the printed book or the online version? And do you have plans for updating the online version? or are you just going to wait till HLA 2.0 to update everything?

It seems to me that assembly is currently used primarily by compiler writers or those who need specialized/optimized functions in another HLL. I'm interested in using assembly in conjunction with C++ mostly to impress my teachers but to also optimize certain algorithms that I'll be required to write such as sorting, compression, and encryption.

I've read many posts to the GCC mailing list concerning the appropriate use of assembly in modern programming. From those posts, they raise an interesting point as to how (specifically) a C or C++ compiler treats inlining asm. They argue that the compiler should have precendence as to how to handle code generation thus overriding (in the majority of intances) the hand-coded asm blocks. Is the only option to compile the C++ code to an intermediate asm file and manipulate that file directly? Thu, 07 Jul 2005 09:26:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments