If "historical" UNIX is one's focus, then need to be able to read (and edit) ATT assembly
The author claims Intel syntax is ubiquitous. True. But so is "historical" UNIX
Long rants about asm syntax are old, tired tropes. Perhaps they are entertaining to beginning programmers but today such rants achieve nothing except to put the sanity (and hence the judgment) of their authors into question
The existing ATT syntax assembler in "historical" UNIX source trees will not be translated it into Intel syntax
By all means, _use_ Intel syntax^1
But if "historical" UNIX is one's focus, comfort with _reading and editing_ ATT syntax, despite all of its alleged flaws, will continue to be useful
1. The author's own footnote:
"You can tell GCC to use Intel syntax for its inline assembly with -masm=intel. This doesn't work with Clang; complain to them. (Or just don't use inline assembly; it's usually not a great idea anyway.) For objdump, pass -Mintel. And for gdb, put set disassembly-flavor intel in your ~/.gdbinit."
It opens with “This article provides a historical account of the major developments in the area of curves
and surfaces as they entered the area of CAGD – Computer Aided Geometric Design –
until the middle 1980s.” So your gut instinct appears to be correct.
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