| ??? 08/06/10 09:20 Read: times |
#177757 - in the absence of information to the contrary Responding to: ???'s previous message |
Andy Neil said:
Richard Erlacher said:
The thing do do would have been to provide the names of a few 805x cross-assemblers and maybe a link or two, and let him choose. If that's all he wanted, he could've googled it himself! didn't require trying to read a bunch of potential requirements into his question. You're the one reading-in requirements! Not at all! He wanted to use assembly language, else he wouldn't have asked for an assembler. He wanted to use his 80C31, as that was what he asked. You are assuming that the question is a well-informed, carefully considered query;
You are assuming that he has these chips and just wants to use them. Don't you think those are reasonable conclusions just from the fact he said so? Nobody else assumed this: it was all on the basis of, "if you're a beginner, then...".
It's (at least) equally likely that he is a beginner and has just grabbed a few keywords from some ancient text. Or maybe he just saw some old devboard - like the one you mentioned - that uses these antique parts. That's possible, but in the absence of any other information, isn't it reasonable to conclude, from his statement, that he wants to program an 80C31, and to do so in ASM? Instead of asking ourselves, "Why would he want to do that?", wouldn't it be better to ask, "Have I answered his question?" No. It is very reasonable to consider whether or not he is asking the "right" question - as experience has shown that the first question as asked is often not the one that really needs to be answered! Perhaps it was reasonable to consider that, but, in the absence of any other information, wouldn't it be reasonable simply to answer the part of his original query that was understandable, which would have required nothing more than the name of an assembler. Even Erik, who often goes off the rails on such queries, managed to do that. Once he has the name of an assembler, he can attempt to find it, download it, and, if he has any sense at all, to read the accompanying documentation. That's when he'll learn where he's gone wrong, if he has, as he'll then have to look at datasheets, etc. That will tell him something, probably to quit and build a model railroad or something else. RE |
