Student "edition" found at {csi dot journalspace dot com}.

Maybe I shouldn't have started this blog now, not with everything that's been going on.

As I think I've mentioned here before, I have two classes now that are about the same subject, Assembly Language, even though they have different course codes and that both are taken for one of the degrees here (yeah, the flowchart has to be revised on that).

And since this is the first time that I've handled one batch in both classes, I had to make sure that what I taught them would not be all that redundant to what I had discussed before.

But I really have to repeat a lot of the basic stuff because this is the first time the Computer Science majors are hearing of these things.

So far the topics that I have discussed that were not in the original class I taught include: conversion from binary numbers to binary coded decimals, which makes it easier to display numbers on the screen and perform simple arithmetic operations.

There has also been alternative methods of division because of the limitations of the included operation, from repeated subtraction to taking advantage of the fact that shifting a number (in this case the denominator) of the operation to the left one place is the same as multiplying it by two, which is the same as algebraically multiplying the fraction by another fraction that equals one, but only to make sure that the quotient is within the prescribed range of the divide function.

Except the easiest alternative, which I was hoping someone would research on using the net, but so far, no luck, they're all relying on what I lecture on, no matter how difficult.

Next there has been signed number operations, which work well enough for addition and subtraction, but for multiplication and division have to be consistent as to the number of bits of the largest value, so that the sign bit (one when the number is negative, and zero otherwise) is preserved.

Only marginally there was also accepting input and displaying output as hexadecimal, which is almost as easy as for binary coded decimals in that every four bits have to be grouped.

Session 2017 needs to discover the acceptable line for the students to tread between teacher reliance and Google dependency. Class dismissed.