ok, off topic, but if you've not written assembly language for the pdp-10 in MACRO-10 --- you haven't lived ! Example of awesomeness: We built a 24-bit AMD2901 bit-slice machine with a simple instruction set for image processing. The custom assembly language code was assembled using macros in MACRO-10. Just another day in the neighborhood. https://bitsavers.org/pdf/dec/pdp10/TOPS10_softwareNotebooks/vol13/AA-C780C-TB_Macro_Assembler_Reference_Manual_Apr78.pdf
Fortunately, you can get your own PDP-10 and catch up on the amazing tech we have (almost) lost: https://obsolescence.dev/pdp10.html On Sun, Jul 27, 2025 at 2:22 PM Greg A. Woods <wo...@planix.ca> wrote: > At Thu, 17 Jul 2025 01:02:21 +0530 (GMT+05:30), Mohan <manms...@gmail.com> > wrote: > Subject: unix assembly programming > > > > is it common to use m4 with gas? are there examples > > i can learn from or just general resources for unix asm > > programming? > > In my experience everyone doing assembly language programming in modern > Unix and Unix-like environments seems to use the C preprocessor for > anything macro-like. It's a very poor solution, but it does the basic > things cleanly enough and is terribly easy to integrate, and is > generally portable enough. It can be used to do a lot, e.g.: > > https://github.com/WestfW/structured_gas > > I'd somehow never heard of "gasp", but then again I've never used the > GNU assembler other than maybe once or twice to test if it could > assemble something I wrote. It looks useful. > > My favourite macro assembler was MACRO-11, for the PDP-11 (my favourite > machine to write assembler for!). There's a version of it available in > ancient BSD archives, however it only knows PDP-11 op codes. DEC may > have had a version for VAX, but I only ever used PDP emulation on a VAX > for assembler -- I don't think I ever wrote any native VAX assembler. I > didn't really ever do a lot with it's macro capabilities, but I really > liked it overall. > > I would emphatically NOT use m4 as a macro processor for assembler. I'm > sure it would work, and would be able to do "interesting" things, but I > think it's too general purpose and probably too finicky (too expressive) > to be actually useful in the things one might want it to do when writing > assembler. > > -- > Greg A. Woods <gwo...@acm.org> > > Kelowna, BC +1 250 762-7675 RoboHack <wo...@robohack.ca> > Planix, Inc. <wo...@planix.com> Avoncote Farms <wo...@avoncote.ca> >
