Re: NASM 0.98.39 vs. NASM 2.03.01 disassembly

Chuck Crayne wrote:
Herbert Kleebauer <klee@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Sadly the NASM macro system isn't powerful
enough to really "make" it a logical syntax.

There has been some discussion among the NASM developers about adding a
more powerful macro system. What features would you like to see?

I'm not a NASM user and therefore surely not in position to make
suggestions for the NASM development. A year ago I did some experiments
with NASM macros (I wanted to show Frank that NASM can already do much
better than it's standard syntax), but I really missed some simple
string manipulating functions which would allow me to process the
macro parameters character by character (for example to use _ instead
of . for local labels or use () instead of [] for indirect addressing).

I would like to see a text pre-processing subsystem (completely
independent from the macro subsystem) which is called by NASM
with each source code line read. This subsystem then can modify
or replace the original source code line and then give it back to
NASM for normal processing (including macro expansion). This
pre-processing sub system must be programmable, so maybe the best
would be to include an already existing GPLed BASIC or FORTH
interpreter. An other way would be to implement a simple virtual
machine (a few instructions, 64k code, data and stack should be
enough so only a few lines of C code should be necessary to implement
it).

With such a pre-processing sub system any NASM user can easily define
his preferred syntax (by loading the appropriate program for the
interpreter from the assembly source code file or an include file).
On the other side, this could lead to completely different looking
NASM source code files. NASM can compile them all, but no NASM
user will be able to easily read or understand a NASM source
written by somebody else.
.

Relevant Pages

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