The Randall Hyde Case ..
In the Good Old days of DOS, Randall Hyde was a well known author of documentation for Assembly programming. Though his contribution was of poor quality (very scholastic and pedantic), we had very few other choices. His Tutorials were the 'best' available ones, at the time.
Politically, Randall Hyde is a typical American Right-Wing Christian Conservative. This is to say that this man can not perceive anything but in terms of competition, and that his competition cannot have any other final target but his personal glorification. What follows cannot be understood without considering and understanding the above stated facts...
Between the early days of the 32 Bits Assembly Rebirth (1995/6) up to 2002, he was joyfully coasting on his past laurels, and apparently did not care that things were rapidly advancing and changing in this area.
When he made up his mind to reinvolve himself, he found he was utterly surpassed by a new generation of programmers. It was far too late for him to come back to the front of the scene, by doing any serious real work to advance the cause. History had indeed passed him by...
NASM existed for years and had been followed by SpAsm/RosAsm, later, by FASM and by GoAsm. All four proving themselves to be very good Products, each having required several years of free, hard and serious development work by their developers/designers.
Facing this situation, he authored a dirty HLL Pre-Parser, with a terrific Syntax, somewhere between an old fashioned Pascal and Assembler, able to output Source Files for the various Assemblers. In other words, a Text-Converter, reading an HLA Source, and outputting an Assembly Source (Of course he could not do it for SpAsm/RosAsm, because of various technical problems he would have had to face, RosAsm being anything but a simple Command-Line-Tool Assembler). Needless to say, his nasty hack against Assembly was first written in VHLL (Flex, Bison and C), the quick and dirty way.
Then he called this pure horror 'The High Level Assembler' (HLA) and, dancing on his past fame, he made a great noise about this great novelty.
As he was quickly convinced that none of the existing active Assembly Programmers would ever have considered the possibility of using such a thing, ... he ''attacked the Market'' ;) by targeting the bottom end: The Tutorials side (addressing beginners). He said to them: ''Well, I can't have any success with HLA. OK, I will have my success as an expert by discouraging beginners from taking up Assembly by writing and publishing tons of impressive documents''.
During many long months, he was strangely stating that HLA had been written for supporting AoA32. Nowadays, when he is criticized by people who wonder why AoA32 is devoted to HLA, - instead of being devoted to an Assembler -, he answers that it is natural he devotes his AoA32 to HLA, because AoA is his Documentation and HLA is his Assembler... As he did not succeed to convince anybody that HLA was an Assembler, he now says that HLA is a ''Compiler for Assembly Language''... but, of course... he goes on calling it an Assembler, each time you let it go...Well...
Finally, he succeeded to find a Publisher willing to sell his AoA32 Book, dedicated to HLA, and he introduced this, as an opportunity particularly adapted to beginners. Given the fact that this man is not only talented at writing tons of Pdf, but also very talented at selling himself, his attempt will temporarily succeed to dry out and deter the already very small number of newcomers (beginners) available for each of the various serious Assemblers Projects.
This sad event will delay the Assembly Rebirth by several years (I estimate around two years). Another sad event came out, at the same time: The junction between Randall Hyde's interests and Steve Hutchesson's interests. Both of them validating the recognition of the other one, as great Master of Assembly and, - why not...take credit - as great Pioneer of the Assembly Rebirth (without having ever contributed anything useful to this phenomenal new rebirth).
The sadder thing is that these two individuals, working continously against the Assembly Rebirth, have been generally accepted and welcomed on the Asm boat board. I am yet wondering if it was really sad or really funny of having these two poor guys playing the Assembly experts, without any base, and denigrating the serious work made by the real Assemblers' Authors...
Well, should I be writing all of this very unpleasant history? I am afraid that this is necessary, for the future:
When the Assembly Rebirth will be effective and booming, you can rest assured that these couple of black birds will return again and try to claim their so stupid and so ridiculous part of glory, skating on the backs of other peoples hard work.
I just want to make sure, by fixing this time frame -July 2003-, that, at that future time, you will remember that they were the guys who most sternly:
Attacked the GPL,
With vigor and zeal negated the oncoming of ReactOS,
Viciously denigrated my own efforts for having SpAsm/RosAsm Assembler growing up to a level where it could be an serious alternative to HLLs, and
Did their best to mislead and deter as many new beginners as possible, with, always, one single and only self serving goal: Their own glorification, at whatever cost to Assembly's future.
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Some of Hyde's Posts
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>How can I get user input in Win32 assembler without calling a C function
>such as printf or scanf?
>
>I'm using MASM if that's for any help..
Call any of the appropriate routines (stdin/stdout) in the
HLA library for MASM32 users.
http://webster.cs.ucr.edu
Cheers,
Randy Hyde
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> Hello
> I am moving from C++ into assembly and I was trying to compare memory
> allocation. So what would be the ASM equivalent of new memory allocation, or
> the free-store, in C++?
> In segment:offset and flat modes please. :o)
> TIA.
Under MS-DOS, you can use the 'UCR Standard Library' malloc and free functions.
Under Win32, you can use the HLA Standard Library malloc and free functions (along with a whole host of other memory allocation routines).
Cheers,
Randy Hyde
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This is a tale of two carpenters.
One walked the Earth 2,000 years ago,
One mocks others' work today.
The first carpenter was born of a virgin,
People who know the second carpenter wish
his mom had remained a virgin.
The first carpenter said 'I am the truth,
the way, the life.' The second carpenter
calls other people 'swindlers' because
they don't do things his way and he wishes
them a happy death.
The first carpenter assembled huge crowds
to listen to him preach. The second carpenter
uses his assembler to scare away huge crowds.
The first carpenter, by his grace, gives
away eternal life, and doesn't place any
restrictions, like the GPL, on that gift.
The second carpinter gives away his assembler,
subject of course, to the restrictions of
the GPL.
The first carpenter is busy preparing a
place for us in his father's house, which
has many rooms. The second carpenter is
busy preparing an assembler that has many
things you don't normally find in an
assembler (like ASCII charts).
The first carpenter tells us that whosoever
belives in him will not perish. The second
carpenter tells us that we should believe him,
someday he'll get the bugs out of his code.
The first carpenter said that we should trust
in his Father, the most high. The second
carpenter says we should not trust anything
high-level at all.
The first carpenter died on a cross for our sins.
The second carpenter is cross with us for the
sin of using someone else's assembler.
The first carpenter said 'Render under Caesar,
that which is Caesar's...' The second carpenter
says that it's okay to use software without
paying for it because all software should be
free anyway.
The first carpenter said that in order to have
eternal life, we must be reborn as a little child.
The second carpenter said that for his assembler
to have any life, assembly must be reborn.
The first carpenter said 'my words will last
forever'. The second carpenter changed the name
of his assembler because the original incarnation
garnered such bad publicity.
The first carpenter came to Earth to fight satan
and all that is evil. The second carpenter uses
his assembler as a weapon to fight: (1) Microsoft,
(2) HLA, (3) MASM, (4) Bill Gates, (5) Randy Hyde,
(6) Steve Hutchessen, and of course, that
'Evil Satan' the United States of America.
Ocassionally, the second carpenter uses his
assembler to fight various other evil doers, too.
The first carpenter rose from the dead on the
third day. The second carpenter resurrected his
assembler after it should have been left for dead.
The first carpenter was crucified.
The second carpenter likes to crucify other products.
The first carpenter spoke in parables.
The second carpenter speaks in nonsense.
The first carpenter said 'drink this wine in
remembrance of me.' The second carpenter seems
to be drinking wine all the time to forget his
problems.
When the waves were high and his disciples were
peeing their pants, the first carpenter calmed
the waves. The second carpenter just pisses on
everyone.
The first carpenter walked on the water.
The second carpenter just claims that a 'preparser'
will allow him to do that in the near future.
The first carpenter taught his disciples.
The second carpenter doesn't have time for beginners.
The first carpenter, when He was 12 years old,
impressed the elders and priests with his knowledge.
The second carpenter, as an elder, seems to impress
a bunch of 12-year-olds.
The first carpenter was crucified for the things he said.
The second carpenter is constantly getting crucified for
the things he says. The difference is, the first
carpenter, as he prophesized, rose from the dead;
the second carpenter just keeps digging himself a deeper
and deeper grave.
Cheers, :-)
Randy Hyde
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I've really found Hutch's nickname for RosASM, 'BetovASM',
to be quite humorous. However, following Rene's methodology
of defining assemblers by what they must not contain rather
than by what features they possess, I feel that this name
is inaccurate. For example, HLA and MASM are not 'assemblers'
because they contain certain HLL-like control statements built
into the language.
This raises the following questions: Does an assembler have
an ASCII table display built into it? A source code browser?
A cut and paste manager? How about a dialog box wizard? Or
even a text editor?
Now I'm not about to suggest that having these things in an
assembly language development package is a bad idea. However,
if Rene wants to complain about languages like MASM and HLA
because they have some non-machine-instruction extensions,
why isn't it fair to consider RosASM using this same criterion?
By doing so, I can only come to one conclusion:
RosASM is not an assembler!
Therefore, as humorous as 'BetovASM' might be, by Rene's
definition schema, the term is incorrect. After all, it is
*not* an assembler. That's why I've chosen to start calling
it 'BetovTool'. It is *more* than an assembler (meaning it
is not an assembler), so it deserves a special name . (BTW,
for those who don't see where it came from, 'BetovTool' is
loosely based on the term 'BethTool' that was invented over
in alt.lang.asm a year or two ago and is the perpetual name
attached to the 'perfect assembler' that remains vaporware
[sorry, Beth]).
BTW, Rene get's my vote for inclusion in Scot Adam's book on
InDUHviduals:
http://www.dilbert.com/comics/dilbert/dnrc/
Oh well, BetovTool has been getting *far* more attention than
it deserves recently. I need to start another 'Yes, HLA is an
assembler' thread to get HLA back into the headlines
Cheers,
Randy Hyde
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