Re: Adding asm examples

[Julio Merino <jmmv%NetBSD.org@localhost>]

On 11/12/11 5:45 AM, Valeriy E. Ushakov wrote:
> Frankly, I think it's pretty pointless.  I think that the target
> audience for these examples is pretty much nonexistent.  People who
> *think* they are the target audience are better off reading psABI &co
> instead.

I agree with you that examples are not an excuse for not having
documentation.  But having documentation is not an excuse for not having
examples either: they serve two very different purposes.  Just look at
any manpage describing an API: it probably contains a piece of code in
it to demonstrate how to use it.  Or just look at any programming book;
the problem is, though, that no programming book is going to talk about
the specifics of NetBSD.

I'd certainly have hunted down and read tons and tons of documentation
to come up with a trivial "hello world" myself, but I'd have spent
hours, if not days, to get something extremely rudimentary working.
It's only because I found a very similar program online that I'd
understand the very basics in a few minutes.

Having a little piece of code that is working right away, that you can
just copy/paste and tweak to experiment with something else that you
want to try while learning, is valuable.  FYI, several other people,
here and elsewhere, have expressed the same feeling.  (OK: this is most
valuable if you already know another language because then you can draw
parallels very quickly.)

-- 
Julio Merino / @jmmv