David Robins wrote:
These all using the 2002-12-02_160000 snapshot.1. Can't ret early from .subs - looks like the parser sees a ret and figures that's the end of the sub.
Yes. Imcc parses and produces code per subroutine, which are delimited by ".sub" and "ret". A proposal was, to change the latter to ".bus" ;-)
2. Most things can only be done in a sub.
Yes
3. It would be nice to have freer naming
Name mangling can take care of this, but the lexer could be improved of course.
4. ret can't immediately follow a label.
This is related to 1).
Resolutions
1. ... (perhaps ".sub" .. ".end"
Yep
Not that I'm trying to slough off fixing these myself and submitting a patch, but I don't want to step on any toes, and the author is the best person to declare what's right and implement it.
We (Melvin Smith, Sean O'Rourke, Angel Faus, me) had already a bunch of discussion on these issues + some more: e.g. imcc reserved words (like "if") clash with pasm reserved words, so that you can't really mix the two languages.
One proposal was, to change *all* imcc directives to have a dot in front. There are 2 problems with this: perl6 (P6C) would need a lot of rework (of course doable) and Melvin (the original author) was really not fond of such changes.
Recent work from J�rgen B�mmels ("Use imcc instead of assemble.pl") clearly shows, that imcc could be the future parrot assembler, where the assembler part is only a small subset of imcc features. Register allocation, optimization and running code are the major goodies.
But I will not make any decisions here (beyond the .sub .. .end thingy, which can be done w/o much damage).
Dave
leo
