>That's good to know. But why not WASM, for consistency? Perhaps NASM >has more features, stronger support for macros and/or is better >maintained? Rules for using one over another? (Like pure vs hybrid >language packages?) History. NASM is available for free for much longer time then WASM; so programs got ported form MASM/TASM to NASM. Now FreeDOS .ASM programs are consistently compiled with NASM.
> Indeed, that's an important distinction. The inherent downside is that > ASSIGN.EXE, for instance, have been carried over for decades and if > modification becomes necessary (bug fixes or adding new features) one > cannot modify and rebuild it with the tools available in the > distribution right away. While this is true, there are just 2 possible ways to deal with this: a) port it to one of the tools provided, once in the future the need arises to recompile it or b) port it to one of the tools provided, just in case in the future someone might need to recompile it. Unless YOU are bored enough to do (a), IMHO the sensible choice should be (b). >> I'll add that several vendors have since released their compilers for >> free (gratis, if not open source) and we link to them from the "For >> developers" page on our website. I'll add that at the time FreeDOS was started, *all* compilers and assemblers were commercial. The "official" compilers for FreeDOS were MSC and MASM. I never considered this a problem. Virtually everyone who was able to modify programs would have access to a compiler; even if not this compiler was just a few hundred bucks away. And investing a few hundred bugs to start your hoppy isn't considered a problem anywhere else. Open source was the possibility to modify existing programs at *any* price. Even today, compilers may be free, but the computers to run these compilers (and the resulting programs) aren't free at all. Tom _______________________________________________ Freedos-devel mailing list Freedos-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-devel
