Simon Humphreys shares how Raspberry Pi’s ARM processor makes it a great tool for A level students to get their hands dirty with assembly language.
Assembly language programming is on every university computer science course and also in numerous advanced level courses - so it must be important! The instruction set for the UK’s AQA A level is akin to the ARM instruction set used on the Raspberry Pi, making it a great tool for bare-metal programming.
The article main points:
- Why learn assembly language?
- Where next?
- A simple example
Once the students know how to write an equivalent ‘if–then–else’ construct and how to branch, it becomes relatively trivial to introduce loop constructs such as ‘do–while’, which have a conditional expression at the bottom of the loop and need to jump back to the top of the loop. Very interesting!
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