> I was exposed to Motorola 68K assembly in college and it completely changed my world--lots of C++ things I considered voodoo suddenly made total sense

Heh. I had this the other way around - picked up 68k asm for fun long before C/C++, and couldn't understand why people had such difficulty with the concepts in those.

I've never learned x86 - partly because I worry that I'd enjoy it too much and waste oodles of time "optimizing" things that don't need it. Probably useful to be able to at least read it, though.