These days I'm writing a lot of code in Ruby and JavaScript on the JVM, and find myself considering Java my current equivalent of assembly. It's sad really, being so far away from what the CPU is actually executing.
I imagine this is similar to how someone who likes to tinker with engines might prefer an old motorcycle they can take apart and put back together themselves even though there are many advantages in terms of reliability, efficiency, comfort, and so on to driving a Prius.
http://research.swtch.com/2008/04/computing-history-at-bell-...
When you're a poor college student as I was, entering opcodes in a monitor/debugger you wrote in BASIC because you couldn't afford an assembler, then yes, assembly was fun.
Fun, that is, until you had to hand-calculate negative jump offsets. Don't remember why, but for some reason I seem to think that the MC6809 I was running on made it difficult to do so.
Typing shit in to the hex monitor for a few years will do that :)
Make that A9 xx; The 6502 accumulator is 8 bits.
I wasn't saying that the accumulator was 16 bit though, rather that the load is from an absolute 16 bit address.
you have to love programming to really appreciate assembly, the succinctness, the satisfaction of being so close to the metal, none of this high level peek and poke nonsense of high level languages :)
you don't write code using a hex dump???
You write assembly code using either hand assembly or more efficiently using a tool called an assembler which makes the tedious task of mapping instructions by name to their hex values easier. After a while you get to remember the common ones though, C9 for example.
And I haven't heard of your school buddy, sorry.
I remember that when I had to do floating-point math or calculate a screen address (something convoluted on an Apple II) I would simply call a subroutine in ROM and pick up the results.
The PDP 10 had a delightful instruction set. While I didn't use the 7094 instruction set, many seemed to feel that it was a good set, and felt let down by the 360 instruction set when it came out.
The motorolla 6809 was nice, and it seemed to have a flavor of the pdp-11 (which itself was a delightfully simple and elegant set).
Simple maybe, but not delightful to program. I don't know of any assembly language that is delightful to program.
BTW, I knew someone from junior high & high school who could write code for the 6502 using a hex dump with amazing speed. You might have heard of him: Randy Linden.