I am not a spambot ...

[rrr314159]

habran, thanks for your kind words! (9 posts ago). Re: sense of humor, Marcus Aurelius said a man should never joke, because no one wld respect him; some truth to that.

My attitude regarding 32 vs. 64 hasn't changed, after another day's experience under my belt. I like 64; but I can't agree that everybody shld switch. Consider the stack alignment issue, which I've got under control now. At first I couldn't understand why people have such a problem with it, but I believe I've figured it out: it all depends what you intend to do with MASM.

I use assembler to investigate things like statistical properties of prime numbers, diffeq solutions, physics simulations. I want speed, significant digits, registers - raw power.  The OS - be it Windows, Linux, whatever - is, from my perspective, a necessary evil. I need a few dozen essential functions: input and output: screen, files, keyboard, joystick etc. With a wrapper to provide necessary shadow/parameter space, I can use them for years, never touch them again. Similarly, if I want to be called from C++, a crude interface to pass a few numbers back and forth is fine. So 95% of the time I don't have to obey Windows calling conventions. I jmp when I can, call when I must, never use procs; don't need data hiding, or OOP (altho of course STRUCTS and Macros are great). No one else needs to understand my code, and it always makes sense to me. Once in a while I get bit by some variable being modified a thousand lines away, but rarely; small price to pay. With this approach I have very little trouble with the stack.

OTOH, most people here are into systems software, and commercial packages, etc. They're constantly involved with OS: paging tables, MBRs, SEH, OLE, sockets, etc. They love interfacing with C; in fact many of them are C programmers primarily. So they have to obey Windows x64 calling convention, like it or not - unless, of course, they stick with 32-bit.

There's a lot more to it than just stack alignment, but you get the idea. For me, not much trouble to get the xtra power; for them, headaches for no good reason (at least, they could see it that way). Ferraris are great, but an old Camaro has its charms too. Just an opinion; I still have a lot to learn about the situation.

anunitu: something is coming down the pike ... that will hit the public after many years (quoting u out of context). I'm afraid you're quite right. It's not an internet of things, tho; it's a small amount of hydrogen.