top and bottom

Rick Hohensee (humbubba@raptor.cqi.com)
Sat, 14 Nov 1998 02:40:24 -0500 (EST)


>> Let me expound on this some. I think we should go farther, and try
>> and set a standard for all assembly languages, and use various subsets
>> of it for most of the instructions on all machines. Doing

bottom up....

If you assume a machine with say, 4 registers, kinda like a
6502 say, but 32 bits, with about 30 instructions, how many
Linux-capable CPUs does the assembler for that critter run
on as-is? Such a cretin-asm would be near-useless for optimizing,
but might have other uses, and I'd just be interested in comments
on this. For Linux-capable-space I guess you can assume some
non-6502 stuff, like an unlink_stackframe thingy, and a
supervisor mode maybe.

>
>"We've got two standards, oh no lets solve it by having three"
>
>Please tell me that isnt what you mean
>
top down.....

gcc has no inate love of the C programming language. It's extensions
are about being as much like a portable assembler as possible, IMO.
So maybe in a sense we have 2.!0 standards.
This pertains also to the guy who doesn't want to port his
INTEL(TM) inline assembly. How much of your assembly looks like C
to gcc?

just curious.
Rick Hohensee

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