Malcolm said:
That's not necessarily good advice.
A C compiler will give you IO facilities that make it much easier to write a
trivial assembler routine. For instance, an assembly program to add two
numbers together is no good unless you can see the result.
What prevents one from calling scanf() printf() etc. from within one's
assembly routines? Granted the ABI will tie you to a particular
implementation, but that's not a big deal when you're doing assembly to
start with.
Also, it's very simple to write small assembly subroutines to convert
string input to a value as well as the reverse, as long as you confine
yourself to integers. I myself did it within a couple of weeks of
starting on assembly. Also note that the authors of the assembly
programming books whose sites I mentioned in my previous post provide a
significant amount of premade library routines to do such common tasks
and provide them freely. So the problems you state aren't really there.
Typically inline assembly builds on pre-existing knowledge of assembly.
The OP has mentioned that he hasn't written a single assembler program
yet, which likely means that he knows no assembly. Hence my suggestion
to him to learn standalone assembly first before tackling the
complexities of a compiler's inline assembly feature.
