On 7/2/2022 10:37 AM, Travis Siegel wrote:
Masm, Tasm, and others all have their own syntax which confuses me
more than helping.
Well, that is not quite correct. And it would be obvious if you did x86
assembler in the early '80s. MASM (and basically TASM (as in Borland
Turbo Assembler)) is using the same syntax as Intel is in their own
assembler and in all Intel documentation. And that is the de facto
standard for DOS x86. TASM "Ideal" mode is purely optional, with some
good and some bad sides. I commonly use the .MASM51 directive in all my
assembler files, as that is the format that is most compatible with
other compilers.
And Turbo Debugger is hands down the best assembly language debugger, EVER.
I tried to look at A86, but that is now so long ago that I don't recall
right now what it was that I didn't like. I don't think that I spend
more than 2 or 3 days playing with it.
Similar with NASM, where for some weird reasons, they made the assembler
case-sensitive, which I would consider utter nonsense (also among my
griefs with C(++)). And it really bites you if you are trying to link
assembler modules with other programming languages. It also
(deliberately) doesn't support some assembler instructions (as per Intel
specs) just because it doesn't fit into their parser (LODS, MOVS, ...),
x87 registers are named differently....
And there are a lot more stupid changes that make it almost impossible
to just compile/assemble older DOS related assembler sources without
investing some additional time to do (error prone) conversions...
Ralf
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