[simplekoala]

I haven't done much assembly (barring some FPGA programming I did in an undergrad course, and writing an editor on a Motorola processor).

This code so eminently readable. Is this the norm or is it Woz working his magic writing incredibly detailed documentation. Writing easily understandable code takes effort and wisdom. Anyone who writes code for a living knows the importance of writing code which is easy to read and maintain.

[danellis]

I used to write a lot of ARM code in the 90s, and, though I say it myself, I thought it was all very readable code. Of course, it was more heavily commented than code I'd write in a higher-level language, but also it's about structuring it well: subroutines and, kind of, objects even.

Of course, it helped that the ARM instruction set was very simple back then.

[gumby]

"This code so eminently readable. Is this the norm or is it Woz...?"

It's super easy to write spaghetti code in assembler, so if you wrote any code of any size you really needed to be super careful in structuring and documenting it. Especially since in the "old days" your selection of identifiers (labels) was also often limited.

Plus assembly is generally pretty regular in structure so you can't rely on the "shape" of the code (e.g. indenting) to find your way, and it's not dense enough to allow a complete functional unit to fit in your fovea.

As a result of that, if you didn't write like Woz did here you ended up with write only code.

Plus Woz was also a very good developer.

[JoachimS]

And to be nitpicking - when you worked with FPGAs, you probably didn't do assymbly code either. Unless what was implemented in the FPGA was a cpu core.

FPGA design is not writing a program with instructions that are executed by a processor. It is describing real hardware with registers, wires, memories, pins and logic gates. This description is mapped onto the actual resources in the FPGA. The result might be a CPU that can execute instructions available as bit values in a memory, but quite often it isn't.

I know this is nitpicking - but as a HW designer I really have a problem when people use the term "FPGA programming". ;-)

[gambogi]

...but they're Field-Programmable Gate Arrays