PC assembler?

[kipman725]

Hello I have spent the past week learning to program PIC chips in assembler and I find the whole thing awsome and far easier to understand than any higher level language I have used and given up on.  I understand that the PIC's have a reduced instruction set and have a Harvard architecture which means I can so stuff like memory mapped I/O.  Where should I go to learn how to program IBM compatible computers in assembler as the extra processing power is :O and what complier should I used, also where can I get an list of the available numonics?

[Giel]

Firstly I assume you want to program assembly in the x86 instruction set ? If so then finding an assembler should be easy enough, and no you don't have assembly compilers. One assembler I personally use a lot is the one delivered with GCC (or MinGW for windows boxes). The one provided by GCC is called "as", the one provided by MinGW is called "mingw32-as.exe".

Then secondly, yes assembly as a language is probably far easier to understand than most high level languages. This doesn't take away the fact however that code written in high level languages is most of the time easier to understand than assembly.

Thirdly as for learning how to program in assembly, well it's basically all about knowing the instructionset. And for that Google is your friend. This really is the most off-topic site you can find for learning to program assembly so I suggest you find another place, since you're probably lucky that I happen to have knowledge of assembly and point this to you out.

PS assembly is the "language", and assembler is a computer program that turns assembly into executables.