dsimcha wrote:
== Quote from Walter Bright (newshou...@digitalmars.com)'s article
Adam Ruppe wrote:
The Microsoft assembler used to have a whole bunch of weird macro
capabilities and strange syntax. I hated it.
What I did when faced with such code is assemble it, *disassemble* the output,
and paste the output back in the source code and work from that.
How did you do this?
obj2asm foo.obj >foo.asm
Don't you lose some important stuff like label names in the
translation? Instead of LSomeLabelName you get some raw, inscrutable
hexadecimal
number in your jump instructions.
Sure, it might need a bit of tidying up by hand, but that was a lot easier than
trying to spelunk what those macros actually did.
I'm not the only one. I know a team at a large unnamed company that was faced
with updating some legacy asm code that the original, long gone, programmers had
gone to town with inventing their own high level macro language. Programmer
after programmer gave up working on it, until one guy had no problem. He was
asked how he worked with that mess, and he said no problem, he assembled it,
obj2asm'd it, and that was the new source.
