On 29/04/14 11:47, dw wrote: > While I'm waiting to hear back from Gerald about my responses to his > other corrections, I have answered one question: > >> How does the user know what is dialect #0? Same for the others? >> >> When I originally wrote that section, I didn't know the answer (which >> is why I left it vague). Now I think I do, but I'd like someone to >> confirm. On my builds of gcc, the dialects are listed (in dialect >> order) under "Known assembler dialects" in "gcc --target-help". Can I >> rely on this enough to put it in the docs? Is there some better source? > > First of all, -masm is (currently) only supported on i386: > http://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc/Option-Summary.html > > Second, i386 -masm only supports two options: > http://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc/i386-and-x86-64-Options.html > > So, the inline asm docs could just say "att" and "intel." However, > there's a difference between using "intel" and "att" as examples of how > dialects work, and "hard coding" these names into this section as the > list of available options. I'm not keen on putting machine-specific > info like this into an otherwise machine-neutral section. > > Such being the case, I replaced the previously vague paragraph with: > > GCC may support multiple assembler dialects (such as "att" or "intel") for
It's generally wise to avoid 'may' in documentation; in this case I think 'can' is acceptable. Also, you should be clear at the time you introduce att and intel that you are referring to the i386 compiler. Something like: "(for example, GCC for i386 supports "att" and "intel" dialects)". R. > inline assembler. In builds that support this capability, the > @option{-masm} > option controls which dialect GCC uses as its default. The > hardware-specific > documentation for the @option{-masm} option contains the list of supported > dialects, as well as the default dialect if the option is not specified. > This > information may be important to understand, since assembler code that works > correctly when compiled using one dialect will likely fail if compiled > using > another. > > This keeps the machine-specific details with the already > machine-specific compile options. While this option only applies to > i386 currently, this text leaves the option open should some other > platform make use of it in the future. > > Unless someone says otherwise, I'm calling this question resolved. > > dw >