Paul My concept was to run a pre-proccessing pass to generate the Macro Expansions, your chosen assembler would then do symbolic substitutions. The pre-processing could be performed by gasp, a bespoke Perl/RegEx unit,or whatever. ie dwl address -> db low(address),high(address) ; comment ... The Perl option would of course permit semantic sugar to be sprinkled to taste
Best Regards Martin -----Original Message----- From: Paul Flo Williams via cctalk [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: 20 February 2026 12:32 To: Martin Bishop <[email protected]> Cc: General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts <[email protected]>; Paul Flo Williams <[email protected]> Subject: [cctalk] Re: Recommendations for 8051 software tools? Martin Bishop <[email protected]> wrote: > Orthogonally, rather than use macros why not use RegEx and your > favorite programming language to fix up the source code's endian > issues. Well, I try to use Perl as often as possible for exactly that reason, but the advantage of a macro assembler is that I get the symbol lookups for free, to save me from brain farts. So far, I just have these two: dwl macro address db low(address),high(address) endm which lets me construct the jump tables. I can't fix up the source to make it big endian because I need to annotate and rebuild the ROM exactly as it was delivered; I just need a readable version. Regards, Paul
