#: 8965 S12/OS9/68000 (OSK)
    30-Dec-90  23:56:18
Sb: #8957-#68000 ASM Language
Fm: Jack Crenshaw 72325,1327
To: William Phelps 75100,265 (X)

William, thanks for the inputs.  I'll have to go off and think about them.

I have no problem with specifying the addressing modes in the command line
(although it would also be nice to be able to do so as program commands. What I
was thinking about was cases where the declaration might change. Example: 
Instead of having to say MOVE.B, MOVE.W, or MOVE.L all the time, you'd just
tell the assembler "Register D0 is supposed to hold a byte." From then on, all
references to D0 would be .B, until you tell it something different.

Even nicer might be to assign variable names to the registers.  Sort of like
the register option of C, but you'd have to do it manually instead of letting
the compiler do it automatically.

One thing I have to be careful about here:  If you go overboard with this
thing, the assembler turns out to be MUCH harder to build than a compiler. You
have all the complexity of a compiler, plus:

 (1) You have to support EVERY machine language instruction, where the compiler
can use only a subset

 (2) There are many more restrictions and special cases imposed by the
hardware, where the compiler can use a syntax that's more general.

I want to have a nice tool, but I'd rather not make it my life's work!

Jack



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