> This is a decision of the GNU as maintainers, not Sun engineers. We (I) > added the --divide option precisely to allow the use of / in > non-comments.
Hi John, I found the bug report for this issue in the bug tracking system for GNU Binutils: [url=http://sourceware.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=4572]Bug 4572: division doesn't work on solaris/x86[/url] (The bug status is "new", even though it was opened on 2007-05-31.) It's clear from the comments in response to the initial bug report that the reason this behavior is being maintained for Solaris targets is to abide by the Solaris assembler reference manual. I think the GNU AS maintainers are operating under a misapprehension. Maintaining compatibility between GNU AS for Solaris targets and Solaris AS should not be much of a priority: it's going to be a rare situation in which someone is going to try to compile something written for Solaris AS with GNU AS. In almost all cases in which someone uses GNU AS under Solaris x86, it is going to be to compile code written for Linux. Therefore, instead of having a "--divide" option which provides compatibility for Solaris targets with Linux targets, such compatibility should be the default behavior. If someone wants to compile code written using the Solaris assembler comment syntax, a new option should be provided for that purpose in GNU AS. (It could be called "--slash-comment".) The patches to GNU AS which would be required would be simple. Can you see any objections to this proposal? If not, I'll raise it with the GNU Binutils maintainers. Regards, Alex -- This message posted from opensolaris.org
