🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <16101@csli.Stanford.EDU>, poser@csli.Stanford.EDU (Bill Poser)
writes:

|> Fancy assemblers have been around for a long time. Consider the
|> VAX assembler (the DEC one, not the UNIX one), which had the pseudo-op
|> JBR which was translated into a JMP or BRanch instruction depending on
|> how far away the target ended up, and allowed a high-level specification
|> of the register save mask for subroutine calls, so you didn't have to
|> figure it out in binary. Or the MACRO assembler for DEC 20s, which
|> had all sorts of high-level stuff. It was practically an HLL.
|>  
|> 

   Ummm...  I don't know what assembler you're using but on my definitive VAX
VMS macro
assembler...

$ create xyz.mar
        .entry main, ^M<>

        jbr     a
a:      ret
        .end main
(^Z here)
$ macro xyz.mar
                                     0002     3         jbr     a
%MACRO-E-UNRECSTMT, Unrecognized statement             !

There were 1 error, 0 warnings and 0 information messages, on lines:
    3 (1)

MACRO XYZ.MAR

   I've only seen this pseudo-operation in Unix/Ultrix VAX assemblers, never in
the real
VAX macro assembler.

   I think that these optimizing assemblers should not be called assemblers
also.  After all,
they're not the 1-1 translators that assemblers are supposed to be.  (True, I
haven't seen
that concrete of a definition anywhere, and it is useful to have some common
instruction
scheduling and peephole-optimizing for a platform done in a common place, but
then it's
not an assembler, IMO.)

------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Michael J. Grier				grier@leno.dec.com
Software Engineer
Digital Equipment Corporation			but I don't speak for 'em!