Re: A patch for linux 2.1.127

Mark H. Wood (mwood@IUPUI.Edu)
Thu, 12 Nov 1998 12:48:37 -0500 (EST)

On Wed, 11 Nov 1998, Robert L Krawitz wrote:
[snip]
> It's certainly true that Unix assemblers have traditionally been very bare
> bones with a standardized syntax. That's 'cuz we Unix geeks like to write
> everything, including the kernel, in C, and our C compilers have traditionally
> been designed to retarget to other platforms easily. So having very different
> assembly formats for different platforms simply gets in the way of compiler
> writers (and the rest of the tool chain, for that matter), without helping
> system programmers very much.

CDC's big machines (6xxx anyway) used to have two assemblers. There was
one that was fit for humans to use, and another designed to be used as the
backend of the FORTRAN compiler(s). While you could use either one for
either purpose, in most cases you probably wouldn't mess with the status
quo. As someone has already pointed out, you can do the same sort of
thing here by using NASM for hand-coded assembly and gas as the compiler
backend.

-- 
Mark H. Wood, Lead System Programmer   mwood@IUPUI.Edu
Innovation is only valuable if it improves one's life; otherwise it's
just one more silly change to cope with.




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