Hello, I haven't been following much of what happens with the different assemblers these days, but my idea is that the same thing as with C or Pascal happens: as much as TASM or MASM are nice products, there are hardly open source actively maintained products that are compatible with them, and hence NASM can be an alternative.
I may be wrong but leaving aside smaller pet problems and trying to go for broader products most widely used even by the FreeDOS community: - Assembler - there is NASM, not compatible with MASM/WASM. I guess there is still (J)WASM as alternative, as I assume that MASM/TASM haven't been neither open sourced nor actively maintained. - C: the only option seems to be OWC for 16-bit and with a good amount of libraries. Apparently there's a community maintained what is called OWC 2.0 as the original project seems to be gone. If they close, I don't know of an alternative 16-bit active open source C compiler. - Pascal: I admit I haven't tried FPC/16-bit yet, and see if I can happen to compile KEYB. I am afraid it'll be hard because the resident part of KEYB has a lot of assembler. TP/BP are now unmaintained (and not open sourced). Similarly, if they close, we don't have an alternative 16-bit active open source Pascal compiler. What a sad panorama :) Aitor On Thu, 7 Jul 2022 at 18:42, Ralf Quint <freedos...@gmail.com> wrote: > 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 > > > > > _______________________________________________ > Freedos-user mailing list > Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net > https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user >
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