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Old May 3rd, 2006, 10:11 AM   #10
DaWei
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It is a matter of perspective. Would you rebuild your carburetor to learn how carburetors work, or would you research carburetors before you rebuilt it? You could wind up in the same place, either way. Narue's point, "you just need to shift your thinking", is the key. There's very little abstraction. Your instructions are controlling the hardware operations that perform logical and arithmetic operations almost directly. I can conceive of your approach, but I haven't lived it. I was given a handful of devices and a stack of spec sheets, told I now had a microprocessor in my possession, and I needed to see how it did trying to control a motor (it failed abysmally). On the other hand, I used Fortran to design some filters without knowing or caring about computers beyond the syntactical and semantic requirements. It was harder to punch the cards than write the program.
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