What is hand-coded assembly language used for these days?
bkovitz: Thanks to all for the many informed and detailed replies!I am now assistant-teaching a college course in low-level computer programming.  It's an excellent course: the students reprogram a children's toy robot that uses the ARM processor.  http://www.amazon.com/Little-Tikes-Giggles-Remote-Control/dp...  They're getting up to speed very quickly on how to get hardware to actually do stuff.Yes, I actually left Silicon Valley to do grad school.  I haven't given up the principle of "do real stuff, see real results", though.  I'm looking to design a couple fairly small homework assignments consisting of optimizing some ARM code.  I want the examples to be real.  Now mulling over which to do...