Thanks for the replies.
Yes Terry, I think it would be very instructive for students who have only used high level languages. Understanding that their elegant data structures will often just be lumped into a contiguous block of memory will, for one thing, make the dangers of buffer overruns much clearer.
The program is definitely free. One reservation on making the source code public is that I'd be worried about different dialects of the assembly language being created. It would be easy to add a MUL instruction, for instance, but that would be much less instructive than seeing the shifts and adds of the multiply function. I've attached the .hex file of ArdEx (you might need to rename the .txt as .hex). If you avrdude it onto an Arduino UNO and run a terminal emulator at 19200 8N1, you should be able to enter and run the 4 line blinky demo and tweak from there. I hope you'll find it fun as I do.
I haven't made up my mind yet on the book. My main hope is that it has some impact on education, but it would be nice to earn something for the work I've put into it.
In posting here, I'm hoping that some teachers or lecturers would be interested in trying ArdEx and the book for themselves. The writing has a conversational but concise style. It covers a lot of ground in not very many pages. I don't want the book to be a "spoon fed" guide, but I do need feedback on where motivated readers have trouble keeping up.
So any and all are welcome to try out the attached image. I have also attached the reference pages so you'll know the ArdEx commands and have a few hints on the assembly language instructions too (though you might have bother guessing the fancier addressing modes).
Anybody who is interested to go further is welcome to follow up, or contact me directly. I assume there's a PM facility here, or e-mail me at robsproj9@gmail.com.
Have fun,
Robert.
ardref.pdf (98.6 KB)
ardex.txt (34.9 KB)