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.

In the second meeting of my Computer Circuit fundamentals lecture class for the second week of the second term, we finally got to run some assembly programs.

What's funny is that since we were following the main textbook, they made several programs that tested the flexibility of the individual instructions, but did not give any of the outputs. So the only reward the students had was that they were able to eliminate all of the errors in their programs (which they only had to type up from what was written on the board anyway) and compile and execute them without making their system reboot or the microprocessor crash.

Maybe I can reorder the sequence of the procedures in their book so that we take up displaying simple outputs first, so that they can see the results of the programs they made. These students, after all, are already veterans in that.

I also had a bit of difficulty in talking to the students about stack manipulation, which is ironic considering that these are Electronics and Communication Engineering students, while their batch mates, in Computer Engineering, are the ones who are studying this in earnest in their Data Structures and Algorithms class, also for this term.

They couldn't wrap their brains around the concept of the top of stack pointer, and the fact that even though the previous stack values were not erased (and I demonstrated this by not erasing the numbers I wrote on the stack on the board) it doesn't matter because it is above the top of stack pointer, therefore it cannot be accessed anymore.

I also told them the importance of having at least the same number of greater of push commands than pop, because if it were the other way around, then the top of stack pointer would go beyond pointing to the bottom of the stack.

Besides the assignment or move command and the stack manipulators – so to speak - we also discussed the addition and subtraction instructions.

This includes increment, decrement and addition taking into consideration the carry flag.

Session 1323 isn't optimally lined up. Class dismissed.