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I didn't say that reading manuals is useless, I said that most people can't learn from just reading manuals, they need some 3rd party aid like examples, sources etc. Don't you think so?
That's how every one learns. Manuals are for complex tasks, I think people starting with assembly (x86) should first start from reading tutorials and assembly examples rather than reading the Intel Manual, since tutorials "assume" that you are a beginner, after you've had enough experience with assembly then you should consider Intel Manuals as your learning resource.
I feel there is nothing called a "real" programmer, it just that some people are hobbyist coders, they aren't serious as opposed to people who are professional and write everything on their own.

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On one fine Sunday, long long time ago...

I attempted my first MASM 'hello world' program... until at the end of the code where I got the end main vs endp conflict poisoning both sides of my brain. I never truly recovered since then.

One thing:
MASM will be dead in a few years, It's high time that those unsophisticated programmers stop using MASM and start with a free assembler like NASM/FASM

Microsoft still use it for low-level stuff (and drivers)

I can't remember much of a choice in 1986, there was MASM and...TASM/A86 maybe?

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No ASM needs a linker. Just FASM can brew MZ and PE while NASM can't. But you can always brew MZ or PE manually. Or you can use a linker with FASM (but not the OMF format).

what is a linker???

is that this strange thing that generate binary around binary, and generate LNKXXXX ERRORS if it doesn't find a .lib referenced in a configuration file via a path variable...

if it does it, it is just a symbol offset assembler, than, it is just an aspect of assembler.

if it does that, the source code just need to know where to pick symbols, not to know where the .lib is, cause the .lib is just a crappy file type, not source code, not property file, not anything like readable file, and is just intended to bloat your job when you want to compile a simple application in a multiMegaBytes binary file full of 0's

<popping a very old thread here>

I've used tasm, masm, fasm, nasm and a little bit of yasm and used each of them for a couple of months, a few of them for many years.

Here is what I think of flat assembler so far:

1. Nice and clean, small, extremely fast (according to my tests it outperforms other assemblers by over ten thousand times, which is insane in and of itself)

2. Extremely powerful macro system, but here starts my pessimism. Because the macro system of fasm ships at the very bones, whenever a programmer creates a new macro and shares it on the internet, people won't understand the macro immediately, because there are no standard macro instructions used in a macro designed from the bone, which makes it extremely inefficient to share macros with other people. Here is where I strongly bless NASM, because if you share a macro designed in NASM, chances are very high he'll understand that macro immediately because it's not designed from the bones and up, it has a little bit of skin on it too, initially.

3. Extreme simplifity with the combined assembler and integrated linker, this is something I highly appreciated when I first used FASM, but after a while, I really (REALLY) missed the command line options you find in other assemblers and when I moved away from FASM to a more complex command line assembler, I was happy again, I mean REALLY happy. Simplicity is not always a good thing, believe me and I hope FASM will reconsider this in the future, even a tiny more option on the command line is better than none at all.

4. I was disappointed when I tried to use an interface in fasm from inside a function, I could not allocate an interface inside the local definitions and had to use a global one for the interface. I have probably done something wrong?

5. Naming conventions in fasm tends to favor shorter names than longer more descriptive names. I think FASM can learn from HTML here. Why isn't HTML designed with shorter names to save bandwidth? Because you don't actually save bandwidth and secondly because shorter names is a bad thing to do. Very long names are bad, if you can find such beautiful naming conventions like NASM uses, things like __float32__(0.1) which is perfect in length and has a very stylish name, with the cool underscores.

When you are compiling a piece of source code, you don't save bandwidth by having a name at 10 bytes versus 50 bytes. The operating system have to read 4096 bytes anyway from the disk and most names don't make up even 8% of the size of the source file.

When you ship something with a name that is short, the user have to open the manual and spend 5 minutes to figure out what it is doing. If you give it 2, 3 or 5 more characters, 5 minutes are saved for the programmer.

It's not wise to count on that the programmer will learn to remember the short names, because if the assembler consists of too many of them, and the programmer rarely needs to use them frequently, he will not learn to remember them and so he will constantly be peeking in the manual.

However, if the assembler has very few names, few macro instructions, shorter names can be used because it's easy to remember a few of them.

The people who designed the __floatxx__ naming convention with the two underscores on both sides, those people were absolutely ingenious, they understand that the visual sensory of the programmer can much more easily remember the word floatxx if its between horizontal lines, pictural memory is more effective than the literal memory if combined. Learn from them.

In my understanding, the goal of fasm is to narrow down everything until you can fit everything at the pin of a needle, so that it's easier to take control of your life, whether it be in bed or behind the screen. Try not to walk that path too much, we masters know what we're talking about.

You're NOT going to lose a partner if you add some command line options to fasm. My personal wish is that we see more of FASM in the future, not so much FASCISM. This is a wisdom you WILL adapt to later in life, you might as well do it early on, I guarantee that you'll change your mind later.

"we masters know what we're talking about"

Masters don't rely on C to make their assembly code to work.

It's necessary to have an assembler written in a HLL language to avoid the death of the assembler when the author passes away. It's called 'being smart' and its an investment.

And you don't rely in C, you're thinking about the source code of the assembler, but the assembler executable is already assembly code, and the assembler phase is not cruical.

Master, judging from your response, I have this funny feeling that you don't know what you are talking about. But hey, I use NASM too you know. In fact there are lots of NASM users in here too due to syntactic compatibility between these two. So I hope you don't simply get offended by threads like this. Come on...

You were the first person to mention offended

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