A 28-byte “hello, world” program assembled with DEBUG.EXE in MS-DOS

Re:A 28-byte “hello, world” program assembled with DEBUG.EXE... by userbinator on Sunday October 30, 2022 @05:02PM (#33398648)

I remember seeing that in old Asm books too. My best guess is that it avoids having too many forward references, which would take up precious memory in the systems of the time and perhaps reach the limit of the assembler sooner.

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Re:A 28-byte “hello, world” program assembled with DEBUG.EXE... by _the_inflator on Sunday October 30, 2022 @05:29PM (#33398924)

Maybe also better for linking the files. At least this was the reason I did it on Amiga when using absolute addresses. I only had to remember the start of the address area even when recompiling.

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Re:A 28-byte “hello, world” program assembled with DEBUG.EXE... by bombcar on Sunday October 30, 2022 @08:20PM (#33400522)

This and the hard coding address comments are the key - forward looking references were expensive (and early enough, impossible) whereas you already knew where your data points were as they came before.

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