[graycat]

"I think C might make more sense if you are more familiar with assembly language."

I've written some assembler in the machine language of at least three different processors. On one machine I was surprised that my assembler code ran, whatever it was, 5-8 times faster than Fortran. Why? Because I made better use of the registers. Of course, that Fortran compiler was not very 'smart', and smarter compilers are quite good at 'optimizing' register usage. I will write some assembler again if I need it, e.g., for

R(n+1) = (A*R(n) + B) mod C

where A = 5^15, B = 1, and C = 2^47. Why that calculation? For random number generation. Why in assembler? Because basically want to take two 64 bit integers, accumulate in two registers the 128 bit product, then divide the contents of the two registers by a 64 bit integer and keep the 64 bit remainder. Due to the explicit usage of registers, usually need to do this in assembler.

But at one point I read a comment: For significantly long pieces of code, the code from a good compiler tends to be faster than the code from hand coded assembler. The explanation went: For longer pieces of code, good compilers do good things for reducing execution time that are mostly too difficult to program by hand which means that the assembler code tends to be using some inefficient techniques.