Explaining how the MASM 2-pass assembler works

Re:Explaining how the MASM 2-pass assembler works by WalterBright on Sunday September 12, 2021 @02:27PM (#28503540)

MASM 1.0 had a linear symbol table, which meant it quickly got excruciatingly slow as the file size increased.

MASM also uses the syntax one finds in the Intel CPU reference manuals. This is also done in the inline assembler for my compilers.

The gnu assembler syntax reverses the operands, which reverses the operands. This drives me crazy because assembler is hard enough without all the bugs from putting the operands in the wrong order.

Besides, I much prefer to be able to compare my assembler code with the Intel CPU specification.

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Re:Explaining how the MASM 2-pass assembler works by mhh__ on Sunday September 12, 2021 @03:26PM (#28504054)

Angels die when AT&T syntax is used. I genuinely hate it.

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Re:Explaining how the MASM 2-pass assembler works by pjmlp on Sunday September 12, 2021 @04:08PM (#28504430)

One day I had the stupid idea to replace the nasm macros of my toy compiler with generated Assembly directly, and to reduce dependencies rely on gas, back when Intel syntax was hardly supported, so AT&T it was.

Never again.

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Re:Explaining how the MASM 2-pass assembler works by blake1 on Sunday September 12, 2021 @06:22PM (#28505606)

I strongly agree with your last sentence, but the issue goes beyond operand order: the addressing syntax for AT&T is nigh incomprehensible to me.

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