Hello Duane!

02 Jun 95, Duane Bielling writes to ALL:

 DB> I have only sketched the surface of Assembly but have a friend in our
 DB> local UG that wants to know if there is an Assembler for OS/2.  If you
 DB> have one or know of one please leave me a message with as many general
 DB> details as possible (e.g. name, availability, functionality, etc.).

The four I know about are:

MASM v6.00 - You can only get v6.1(1?) now, but I believe Microsoft will
sell you a 'downgrade' if you plead with them (are they nice people
).  6.0 was the last version to include an OS/2 version (you'll
need to play around for a bit if you want to do 32-bit programs - all the
supplied stuff is for 16-bit programs).

TASM - The OS/2 version is only available with Borland C/C++ for OS/2

WASM - Watcom's assembler.  AFAIK, only available with Watcom C/C++ (or maybe
some of their other products?).

GAS - GNU Assembler.  Completely free - part of the GNU C/C++ package.

I use MASM v6.00.  I bought it originally because it was the standard.  It
has everything I want.

I've not used TASM much, many people love it.  I wasn't overly impressed
with what little I *did* see of it, but then I'm used to MASM.

Never used WASM.

GAS has the advantage of being free.  I think that's probably the only
advantage it has.  Admittedly, I haven't used it much, but then it's
attempting to make you write assembler in a machine independent fashion (so
source and destination operands are back to front from normal Intel
notation etc.). Although it may make porting programs a little easier, any
assembler (that I can think of) that is needed on a different processor is
going to need a fairly major re-write anyway.
GAS also doesn't use the standard .OBJ file format.  This means that you
are stuck with using the GNU linker ('LD').

As I said, I use MASM v6.00 because I'm used to it and I like it.  Your
mileage may vary.

Hope this helps a bit.

bcnu,

Richard.

--- GoldED 2.40