ian@sibyl.eleceng.ua.oz.au (05/09/90)
I invited discussion sometime ago on assembler syntax. There is no really clear concensus except that most people seem to agree with me that the original gas syntax sux. The only question is whether to adopt the NS SysV syntax. A couple of people suggested this but there was no concensus and so the simplest thing is to leave it like it is. Also the current syntax is compatable with Bruce Culbertson's assembler. The gas uses '|' as a "line comment" character. This is silly as it means you can't have expressions with logical "or" in them. Since there is no longer any need for a '#' character to mean "immediate mode", '#' can be used as the comment character everywhere. These changes are trivial and I haven't updated the gas patches as I am waiting until I have perfected(*) a shell/sed script to convert Bruce's assembler syntax to gas assembler syntax. Whilst, gas has compatable opcodes and addressing mode syntax to Bruce's assembler, thhe comment character is different and the pseudo ops need some work. Ian Dall * Possibly not doable with sed when you take things like the possibility of comment characters within strings. It seems to be pretty good in practice though.