On Sat, 24 Feb 2007 18:39:31 -0000, George Gwilt <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

>
> On 24 Feb 2007, at 15:52, Rich Mellor wrote:
>
>>
>>>
>>> On 23 Feb 2007, at 18:44, Daniele Terdina wrote:
>>>
>>>>
>>>> What would prevent GWASS to be augmented to 'understand' Qmac
>>>> macros? (In
>>>> general terms... I'm not familiar with either assembler having only
>>>> used
>>>> Metacomco's assembler myself).
>>>
>>>
>>> GWASS macros, like HISOFT assemblers and others (in fact all others
>>> that I have seen  except Qmac) use \1, \2 etc to signal parameter 1,
>>> parameter 2 etc. Qmac uses names on the first line of the macro after
>>> the word MACRO. So
>>>
>>> fiddle_de_dee       MACRO par1,par2
>>>
>>> would start a Qmac macro.
>>>
>>> Later you might have inside this macro
>>>
>>>     DC.L par1
>>>
>>> GWASS would have
>>>
>>> fiddle_de_dee       MACRO
>>>
>>>                             DC.L    \1
>>>
>>> I will most certainly not myself  alter GWASS to define macros in the
>>> non standard Qmac form.
>>>
>>> To alter GWASS would be possible, because almost anything is possible
>>> in computing, but I do not think it worth it. After all I have
>>> already altered ALL the macros used in SMSQE so that the altered
>>> versions can be used instead of the Qmac ones, so there almost
>>> nothing to  be gained by altering GWASS to read Qmac macros.
>>>
>>> It would be more to the point for someone to alter Qmac so that it
>>> could read the standardish format of GWASS macros. But that would be
>>> (a) impossible and (b) lead to a more expensive Qmac I imagine.
>>>
>>> These are just my opinions and anyone is free to look at the source
>>> code of GWASS and make suggestions as to how the change might be
>>> made.
>>
>> The problem is that currently, you need two versions of the source
>> files
>> presumably, dependant upon whether GWASS or QMAC is to be used to
>> assemble
>> the sources.
>>
>
> I have produced SMSQE source which allows the use of either GWASS
> macros or Qmac macros by the choice of one of two directories within
> the source code. One directory contains all the macros in Qmac form
> and the other all the macros in GWASS form. The rest of the source
> code remains the same for both GWASS and Qmac.
>
>>
>> This means that non 68020+ users cannot currently compile the source
>> unless they purchase QMAC (Oh dear it costs £15 for Quanta members
>> - that
>> is such a huge outlay).
>>
>
> Yes
>
>>
>> However, one option would be to write a basic program which could
>> search
>> through the source files and replace the parameters with \1, \2 etc
>>
>> This should not be too difficult to achieve, but it does mean that
>> only
>> one set of sources needs to be maintained and it would be easier to
>> assemble them with other macro assemblers.
>>
>> I have the QMAC manual here - it looks as though you can have:
>>
>> fiddle_de_dee MACRO par1,par2,par3.... etc
>> fiddle_de_dee MACRO par1 par2 par3.... etc
>>
>> The main problem is if the sources use the alternative method of
>> accessing
>> the parameters, as
>>
>> DC.L par1                    and
>> DC.L .PARM(1)
>>
>> are both the same.  .NPARMS is another function which returns the
>> number
>> of parameters passed, therefore you could presumably create this in
>> a loop
>> to read all of the parameters one by one.  Do the sources contain
>> these
>> variants?
>>
>
>
> I'm afraid the problem is far more complicated than just the naming
> of parameters. The only way GWASS or Qmac could deal with both forms
> of macro would be by writing a separate parser for each. There would
> of course have to be a switch somewhere to tell the assembler which
> macro type to expect.
>

I feared as much - however, as the macros are all within one directory as  
you say and easy enough to select, this is not really a problem.



-- 
Rich Mellor
RWAP Services
URL:http://www.rwapsoftware.co.uk
URL:http://www.rwapservices.co.uk

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