ggww@sjfc.UUCP (Gerry Wildenberg) (04/18/91)
I am looking for more detailed, more accessible, more readable documentation for the `as' assembler than is contained in the "Berkeley VAX/UNIX Assembler Manual". If anyone knows of any books or articles on this subject, please let me know. I would prefer something readable by my undergraduate students who find the above mentioned article too terse. Note that I am aware of several books on VAX assembler language that give zero space to the VAX/UNIX assembler. If the documentation distributed by any of the non-Berkeley flavors of UNIX contains better discussion of `as', I would appreciate hearing of it. And if someone wanted to send me a copy (electronic or hardcopy) of that documentation I would be thrilled and grateful and I would be glad to cover their expenses. -- Gerry Wildenberg ggww@sjfc.uucp St. John Fisher College sjfc!ggww@cci.com Rochester, NY 14618 ...!uunet!uupsi!cci632!sjfc!ggww
gwyn@smoke.brl.mil (Doug Gwyn) (04/19/91)
In article <1758@sjfc.UUCP> ggww@sjfc.UUCP (Gerry Wildenberg) writes: >Note that I am aware of several books on VAX assembler language that give >zero space to the VAX/UNIX assembler. There is good reason for this. It is that the designers and implementors of VAX UNIX did not intend that there be much manual coding in assembly language; it was meant to serve two functions only: (1) implementation of stuff that simply couldn't be done in C, such as small portions of the UNIX kernel and some C run-time support; (2) a target language for high-level language translators. On VAX/VMS, on the other hand, it was intended from the outset that a fair amount of application coding would be done in assembly language; thus the VAX/VMS macro assembler provides much better support for manual coding than does the VAX UNIX assembler. I'm not sure it is a good idea to teach VAX assembly-language programming under UNIX.