Article

Structured programming in Macintosh assembly language (abstract)

Author:

Clint FoulkAuthors Info & Claims

CSC '90: Proceedings of the 1990 ACM annual conference on Cooperation

Page 414

https://doi.org/10.1145/100348.100430

Published: 01 January 1990 Publication History

Abstract

Ever since Dijkstra first pointed out the harmfulness of the Goto twenty years ago, programmers in high-level language have become more and more accustomed to writing structured programs. No such development has taken place in assembly language due to the lack of such constructs as the If-Then, If-Then-Else, While-Do, and Repeat-Until statements of Pascal.

It is possible, however, to achieve the same effect by the exercise of programming discipline if all branching in the program is made to follow the rules of structured programming. For example, an If-Then statement such as If X = 0 Then Y := 1 Else Y := 2 EndIf may be implemented in Macintosh assembly language as If1 Tst.W X(A5) ;if X < > 0; Then Goto; Else1 Bne Else1 Move.W #1,Y(A5) ;Y := 1 Bra EndIf1 ;Goto Endif1 Else1 Move.W #2,Y(A5) ;Y :=2 EndIf1

While such programs may appear somewhat strange at first, consistent application of the discipline makes it very easy to convert any algorithm expressed as a structured high-level language program to Macintosh assembly language completely mechanically and, therefore, correctly.

A textbook on Macintosh assembly language incorporating these principles is under development by the author.

Index Terms

Structured programming in Macintosh assembly language (abstract)
1. Software and its engineering
  1. Software creation and management
    1. Software development process management
      1. Software development methods
  2. Software notations and tools
    1. Context specific languages
      1. Macro languages
    2. General programming languages
      1. Language types
        Assembly languages

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Information

Published In

CSC '90: Proceedings of the 1990 ACM annual conference on Cooperation

January 1990

475 pages

ISBN:0897913485

DOI:10.1145/100348

Chairman:
Arun Sood
George Mason Univ., Fairfax, VA

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 01 January 1990

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CSC90

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CSC90: 18th Annual ACM Computer Science Conference

February 20 - 22, 1990

D.C., Washington, USA

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