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.

Had my second exam in Assembly Language Programming today on the topic of multiplication and division, for both 8 and 16 bit registers.

I only had two questions, one which was a less than twenty line multiplication program, the other of which had divisions in a loop.

The first was just to see if they understood how assembly language's commands automatically shift from 8 bit to 16 bit to 32 bit and inversely.

Values were assigned to 8 bit registers, but multiplication was done on 16 bit registers.

The product was 32 bit, but they had to take 8 bit values in that product and display them to the screen, after a variety of ASCII conversion commands.

The second was how to display a five digit 32 bit number to the screen by dividing by 10,000 first, then 1,000 and so on, getting the single digit quotient and the integer remainder.

Only one user-defined variable was used for each, by the way.

In the second program, there was a pre-defined 5-execution loop, and each digit was dumped or overwritten as soon as it was displayed.

There were in fact two division operations here because it was also part of the program that 10,000 divided by 10 gives the next divisor to get the thousands place in the value to be displayed.

Instead of reverting from using 16- to 8-bit division like in the last program I gave them, here it was all 16-bit division, but knowing that the result had a maximum value of 9, only the lowest 8-bits was extracted to be displayed to the screen.

I was surprised that several of the students were still unprepared, going to the class late (due to last minute cramming) and not bringing the notes from all the other lectures and exercises.

That's why they were still asking me basic questions about commands.

Session 1697 has reached fourth year without adequate long term plans. Class dismissed.