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Old February 24th 14, 12:45 AM posted to comp.sys.intel,comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.chips,alt.windows7.general
Gene E. Bloch[_4_]
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Posts: 32
Default How many x86 instructions?

On 2/23/2014, J. P. Gilliver (John) posted:
In message , charlie
writes:
[]
At the time, the only out we had in order to meet contract
requirements was to write a combination of assembly code, compiled
code, and horrors,
machine code. If that wasn't bad enough, we then had to
"disassemble"
the machine code to see if there was a way to duplicate it at the
highest level possible, without writing compiler extensions.


What's machine code (as opposed to assembly code) in this context?
How did you write it?


This might help:

When I owned an Apple ][, for a long time I din't own an assembler
program. I wrote some code in hex...

Let me tell you, "a small change" was a complete oxymoron.

"Machine code" means the actual bits or bytes that go into memory.
"Assembly code" is a *symbolic* language. Assembly language code, for
various reasons, might not even be a perfect 1 to 1 match to what goes
into the machine.

--
Gene E. Bloch (Stumbling Bloch)