For what it’s worth: when I used to do assembly on the commodore 64, after a while, your eyes are so used to seeing A9 close to LDA let you start knowing them by heart without even thinking. Of course this is possible on 6502 and will be way harder on modern CPUs. In the end of the number of common opcodes might have been 30-50, and you can always look up the rest from a one-page table.
I remember that was a book that went on to say that you should learn machine code (that is, raw opcodes), not assembly, to program the c-64. Not sure I would agree, but it’s definitely feasible.
The only thing that is strange in the Woz story is that you would usually start by creating a dirt-poor monitor/assembler so that you would have a sane environment to do further development in. That was the approach manuals from the era suggested for new hardware (eg Rodnay Zack’s)
> The only thing that is strange in the Woz story is that you would usually start by creating a dirt-poor monitor/assembler so that you would have a sane environment to do further development in.
He wrote a monitor as well, but the premise here is that he wrote the BASIC interpreter before there was a computer at all, so a monitor wouldn't have helped.
I remember that was a book that went on to say that you should learn machine code (that is, raw opcodes), not assembly, to program the c-64. Not sure I would agree, but it’s definitely feasible.
The only thing that is strange in the Woz story is that you would usually start by creating a dirt-poor monitor/assembler so that you would have a sane environment to do further development in. That was the approach manuals from the era suggested for new hardware (eg Rodnay Zack’s)
He wrote a monitor as well, but the premise here is that he wrote the BASIC interpreter before there was a computer at all, so a monitor wouldn't have helped.