🚀 go-pugleaf

>From article <PBG.91May3142006@bob.cs.brown.edu>, by pbg@cs.brown.edu
(Peter Galvin):
>> I just received an add from Microsoft for Masm 6.0.  It's an upgrade
>> offer, and would cost me $75 to go from 5.1.  This is the first I've
>> heard of 6.0.  Does anyone know if it is out yet?  What it's list
>> price is?  Thanks.
>
>I just got my offer also.  Since I originally paid about $65 for masm 5.1
>I very seriously doubt that I will upgrade.  I saw a headline about 6.0
>coming out, but have not had the time to read the article - don't know what
>the upgrade gets me (also haven't read the stuff with the upgrade offer -
>just enough to get the price).  I will probably "upgrade" to tasm anyway -
>all the rest of my tools are going that way, mainly because the quality

I attended the MASM 6.0 public/press unveiling at the San Jose
Convention Center
on 4/30/91 (part of some sort of Corporate Developers Conference put on by
Microsoft).  As luck would have it, I got MASM 6.0 for a door prize that night.
Its up on my 386 system now.

A careful read of the upgrade glossy covers the main improvements/changes.
On the plus side, if you already work with MS C 6.00A and PWB 1.1 (the
integrated development environment) MASM nows joins C 6.00 and BASIC 7.0
with good on-line help, examples, documentation.  I smiled when during the
question period Microsoft admitted that omitting the printed docs with C 6.0
was a mistake ("we heard you" the man explained).  The other major goodie
for me is the strong integration of a mixed C/MASM programming environment.
C prototypes and structures now have direct MASM counterparts and MASM 6.0
can translate a .h file to a .inc file.

They were also excited about the sparsity of NOPs due to a n-pass assembler
that could arrange things better.  The near/far conditional jump restrictions
of the Intel architecture they claimed to have overcome by reordering the
conditional test and jumps.  Although MASM 6.0 can work with 32-bit addresses
and has 486 specific support, it does not come with a DOS extender or linker
to permit true flat 32-bit code executables by itself.

The MASM 6.0 package includes the same PWB 1.1 as in the MS C 6.00A upgrade,
but does offer a more recent set of utilities: the linker, CodeView, and
the smartdrive/ramdrive/himem group.  I installed the DOS only stuff with
examples and full help docs and it ate up about 4Mb, though I could trim
about 0.5-1 Mb in redundant stuff from C 6.00, Windows 3.0, ...

I'm not crazy about programming in assembler anymore.  I have found that
inline assembler works very well for me.  I don't need the new, expanded
MACRO extensions in MASM 6.0 that offer high level conditional constructs
like C or Pascal.  All in all, I'm glad to have it.  The upgrade price
of $75 is about what I could justify, but I'm sure your mileage will vary.

-- Curt Deno
   dcdeno@united.Berkeley.EDU
   grad student and part-time software developer