[plug] Re: Assembler waffle

[Peter Wright]

On Wed, Nov 17, 1999 at 12:26:56PM +0800, Leon Brooks wrote:
> Peter Wright wrote:
> > On Tue, Nov 16, 1999 at 03:54:41PM +0800, Leon Brooks wrote:
> >> Christian wrote:
> >> The first thing that they'd make you do on the Windows machine is
> >> include windows.h
> 
> > .. for an assembly program? *confused*
> 
> > Although I haven't written any assembly for a loonng time, maybe x86
> > assembly has an #include directive now :).
> 
> It always has had, although previously without the leading #.

*sound of new information getting inserted in Pete's head*

Ow.

:)

> Windows-based assemblers know enough about the C preprocessor to use
> the symbols.

Fair enough.

> > PS. I thought nasm was supposed to be a considerably superior
> > assembler to gas... I recall reading a Linux Journal article on
> > assembly programming a while back which strongly recommended it.
> 
> But gas comes with everything. It's as free as, um, air?

There's a Debian package for nasm (apt-get install nasm) and it's in
the "main" section, so I suspect it's essentially as "free" as gas
(although I'm not sure whether it's GPLed or not). There are quite a
few cases of GPL (or close) packages that are technically equivalent
or superior to those adopted for the GNU system - just because
something has the metaphorical "GNU" sticker on it certainly doesn't
mean it's better than the alternatives, but neither does it
necessarily mean it's any "free-er" :).

Examples include things like Emacs/XEmacs, GNOME/KDE, gcc/egcs (before
egcs became gcc again) and gas/nasm.

I certainly don't know enough to make a technical judgement between
gas and nasm, I just know that I read an article by someone who _was_
and who was unambiguously in favour of nasm.

I'll see if can hunt down the article if you're interested in their
reasons.

> > "There are a billion people in China. And I want them to be able to pass notes
> > to each other written in Perl. I want them to be able to write poetry in Perl.
> 
> > That is my vision of the Future. My chosen perspective."
> 
> >   -- Larry Wall (Open Sources, 1999 O'Reilly and Associates)
> 
> PERL already looks kind of like Chinese... (-:

Yay Larry. :)

Pete.
-- 
http://cygnus.uwa.edu.au/~pete/

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