Re: Windows Assembly

On Thu, 15 Sep 2005 20:13:46 -0400, JGCASEY <jgkjcasey@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Richard Cooper wrote:

Now I'm not debating that at all.  The HLA
language is a perfectly valid assembly language
in my opinion.  (it still has processor registers
and instructions, so it's more assembly language
than it is anything else) It's just that the HLA
program is not an assembler, it creates output for
MASM and so it is a preprocessor.


Doesn't that make *any* HLL with an inline assembler
an assembler in the sense that they also have processor
register and instructions?

I know I addressed that already, but this thread is so thick I can't find it, so I guess I can't expect you to either.

Basically, GCC compiles the C code, and preprocesses the inline assembly. There's certainly no reason why a program can't do both. I guess there's a similar debate on wether or not GCC compiles the C code, or if GCC and GAS as a unit compile the C code. Most people these days would consider a program that takes C code as input and produces assembly code as output to be a compiler. On the other hand, very few would consider a program that takes C code as input and produces C code as output to be a compiler, they would call that a preprocessor.

HLA is an assembly language. MASM is an assembly language. The HLA program converts code from one assembly language to another. It doesn't assemble anything.

If what HLA does is assemble programs, then we can make a similar version of MASM, one that assembles it's programs by converting them to HLA. Then we can use these two assemblers together and assemble a piece of code an infinite number of times and still not have an executable. Obviously that's because neither of them is really assembling anything at all, they're just converting back and forth between two assembly languages.

When I use assembler in a C procedure am I doing
assembly programming?

You don't think so? It may only be a couple of lines, but inline assembly is assembly.
.

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