How widespread is the use of the PEP/8 assembly simulator in education? For teaching assembly language and computer architecture, are any other platforms besides PEP/8 used, and if so, what are they called and how widespread are they?

Or more generally, how is assembly language usually taught at the college level? I need more information than just my personal experience in one class.

I ask because I have created a similar but more powerful platform and need to comprehensively evaluate the existing systems for my research project.

I haven't been able to find an authoritative source about PEP/8 but this powerpoint describes it pretty well:

PEP/8 Overview

Basically it is a very simple virtual machine that teaches the basics of assembly programming.

I think that PEP/8 too simple and would support teaching with real architectures, as some of you have mentioned.

I have studied at several public schools in California and PEP/8 is used universally here.
At Colorado State University we teach the LC3 assembly language. A quick search for LC3 assembly language shows links to courses at multiple universities. Our course is normally taken by students in the second year and has three primary subject areas.


C language - students already have at least two semesters with Java, so the programs are more advanced, frequently including an assembler and/or simulator for the LC3.
Assembly language - students learn the assembly and write programs for 16 bit floating point math and learn how the run time stack is used in function calls (commonly in the context of a recursive function).
Hardware - students study hardware using Logisim. They commonly design some of the control for the LC3 machine.


In looking at other schools, I have found several that use subset of MIPS. I hope that helps