Ulrik Mikaelsson wrote: > If you're looking for uncommonly used language-features that could > easily be otherwise solved, go ahead and remove asm instead. I'll > guess it's about as uncommon as octal literals (or maybe even more), > have simple other solution (just compile it separately and link), > and has much greater impact on the language and the compiler.
Actually, inline asm can't be replaced. If you link it separately, it won't be inlined... There's also a huge difficulty change. 010 -> octal!10 is a simple change. It'd be enormous effort to de-inline assembly, even if it were actually possible in the first place! Consider asm in version statements.... Also, unlike octal literals, it couldn't be replaced by templates either; inline asm enables things that are otherwise impossible. There's simply no way for the language to express many of the instructions available to you in asm. It's a foundational building block. This leads into the commonness too. I don't think I've *ever* wanted an octal literal. But, assembly is useful in 3/5 of my programs. Heck, even more, if you count library functions that use it. (though lib functions could in theory be linked separately)
