I used debug to write some moderately serious (~5k lines of code) toy programs in assembly. It worked. Labeling it with insults is historical revisionism; it was part of the basic toolkit for how you hacked around on DOS computers of the time.
I learned a ton about low-level computer operations from using debug. It's more than an assembler, it's also a runtime environment with breakpoints and a debugger, and a hex editor. It really manipulates everything going on with the computer at a byte-by-byte level. I wouldn't have learned all that quite the same way from any "real" tools like MASM or the Norton debugger.
I learned a ton about low-level computer operations from using debug. It's more than an assembler, it's also a runtime environment with breakpoints and a debugger, and a hex editor. It really manipulates everything going on with the computer at a byte-by-byte level. I wouldn't have learned all that quite the same way from any "real" tools like MASM or the Norton debugger.