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Before dropping out of college 25 years ago I took an ASM programming course. The processor was the PDP 11. The official terminals were dec writers to an emulator but I happened to have access to a PDP 11 unix box.

I cut my teeth doing Z80 ASM hacking on a Timex Sinclair and had no patience for this required class.

I wrote all my assignments in C and dumped the intermediate output. The grader always gave me nice comments like "well structured code."

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When I took my assembly language course back in college, the teacher graded us by comparing the size of our solution to his solution and assessing a penalty for every extra byte we wasted, so we couldn't do things like that. You also got no partial credit for non-working solutions.

That said, I did read the manual and figured out how to make my solution call his solution, but I couldn't use that because the TAs were smarter than that and the teacher was very interested in anyone who could beat his solutions by even one byte.

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