The introduction of a full-fledged machine simulator exposes students to the basic ideas of computer architectures. By reading the entire program, students get a good idea of how the hardware machine is built and how it works. Programming short examples in numeric codes gives the students a feeling for the physical model of computation underlying hardware.

The simulator is the starting point for an exploration of low-level programming and the history of machine-oriented programming languages like assemblers and C. The students are introduced to

1. the menmonics of assembly language,

2. the register allocation of C,

3. the "manual" allocation of heap memory, and

4. the basic trade-offs of Scheme, C, and assembly programming.