Teaching Assembly and C Language Concurrently

The paper discusses whether (and how) to teach assembly coding as opposed to (or in conjunction with) higher programming languages as part of a modern electrical engineering curriculum. We describe the example of a very simple cooperative embedded real-time operating system, first programmed in C and then in assembler. A few lines of C language code are compared with the slightly longer assembly code equivalent, and the advantages and drawbacks are discussed. The example affords students a much deeper understanding of computer architecture and operating systems. The course is linked to other courses in the curriculum, which all use the same hardware and software platform; this lowers prices, reduces overheads and encourages students to reuse parts of a written code in subsequent courses. A student learns that badly written and poorly documented code is very difficult to reuse.