a218@mindlink.UUCP (Charlie Gibbs) (06/26/90)
Based on letters I've been receiving, I've been planning
further enhancements to A68k. I'm not sure of the possible effects
certain changes might have, so I thought I'd throw a few things out
for discussion.
Is there any sort of standard regarding periods within labels?
Right now, A68k treats a period just like another character. This
has brought up a couple of things. First of all, to explicitly
specify absolute long or absolute short addressing, you have to
enclose the label or expression within parentheses before appending
the .W or .L (e.g. (label).w) to avoid confusion. Second, I've
been told that both Devpac and ArgAsm assume that any label beginning
with a period is a local label (A68k uses a backslash for this).
How widely used is this convention? If I were to adopt it, how many
programs would break? Should I use a command-line option to activate
such a feature?
I've stayed away from options embedded in the source file,
including such Metacomco directives as LLEN and PLEN. I feel that
such things should be command-line options; you shouldn't have to
change your source file just to change things like that. Besides,
I don't want to start adding a myriad of little A68k-specific
directives which would give any other assembler indigestion.
Any views on this? How about the trick I've seen some compilers
use where option switches are disguised as comment statements which
would be ignored by any assembler which doesn't recognize them?
(For example, all statements starting with "*$opt...")
I've had a suggestion to use environment variables to store
commonly-used options to avoid unwieldy command lines. Are there
conventions as to the use of environment variables, both on the
Amiga and on other systems? I'm trying to keep A68k as portable
as possible, but this one sounds like a winner if I can find a
suitably system-independent way to do it.
Thanks to everyone for your comments. Keep those cards and
letters coming. (tm)
Charlie_Gibbs@mindlink.UUCP
Honk if your horn is broken.