Work in progress - combined introduction of C and assembly with a focus on reduction of high-level language constructs

Abstract

This paper describes the reform of a sophomore-level course in computer organization for the Computer Science BS curriculum at the University of Texas at El Paso, an urban minority-serving institution, where Java and integrated IDEs have been adopted as the only language and development environments used in the first three semesters of study. This effort was motivated by faculty observations and industry feedback indicating that upper-division students and graduates were failing to achieve mastery of non-garbage-collected, strictly imperative languages, such as C. The similarity of C variable semantics to the underlying machine model enables simultaneous mastery of both C and assembly-language programming and exposes implementation details that are difficult to teach independently, such as subroutine linkage and management of stack frame. An online lab manual has been developed for this course that is freely available for extension or use by other institutions. In this paper, we report on pedagogical techniques for facilitating student understanding of the relationships between high-level language constructs, such as algebraic expression syntax, block-structured control-flow structures, and composite data types, and their implementations in machine code.