Last year I taught the undergraduate students on my course "Textual Studies Using Computers" to do 8080 assembly language programming, using the eight Altair Clones in my lab. Amazingly, since they are students of English Literature, they got the hang of it and were able to write programs for interesting textual projects. (One group wrote a program that counted the word-lengths and sentence-lengths in texts and used it to compare speeches by different US presidents, for example.)
On the kind advice of members of this forum, I taught my students to handle binary numbers primarily using hexadecimal representation. To counteract the Altair front panel's encouragement of octal notation I put coloured sleeves on the switches to group them in batches of four, for example. This all worked rather well, but I was thinking that for next academic year I might just experiment and see if the students do any better using octal notation for everything. There certainly were some students who just couldn't commit to memory the 4-bit patterns for A, B, C, D, E, and F, for example, and had to figure them out afresh every time. Maybe memorizing just eight 3-bit patterns will be possible for all the students.
Which leads me to my question: does anyone know of an assembler that will produce its PRN file using octal rather than hexadecimal notation for the memory addresses and machine code? Presumably, even if I find one of those we'll still have to use HEX format files to get our programs into the Altair Clone: there's no other way to upload our object code, right? (I should say, we don't run any operating system: the students use Altairs that have nothing at all in them when started up -- everything in memory is loaded into it by the students during the class.)
Regards
Gabriel Egan