Re: m68k - Dropping the Motorola syntax

[Bernardo Innocenti <bernie at develer dot com>]

On Monday 18 August 2003 21:53, Per Bothner wrote:
> Bernardo Innocenti wrote:
> > Of course I meant to remove the least used one, which is...
> > err... mumble mumble... the MIT syntax :-)
>
> The MIT syntax is the one that GNU tools originally supported.
> I thought by now gas supports both syntaxes, but are both still
> being maintained?

All patches for the m68k back-end I've seen so far have been
careful to update both the MOTOROLA and MIT syntax. However, my
guess is that the MIT syntax could easily get broken without
anyone noticing because very few GCC developers can test on
the few targets still using it.

The version of GCC imported in OpenBSD CVS tree is quite outdated.
The NetBSD people are working on a GCC 3.3.1 right now (they've
skipped 3.3.0, AFAIK).

Unless they've recently changed habits, they're not likely
to merge back their patches into mainline.


> Another question is: which syntax do our 
> dis-assemblers (in gdb and binutils) emit?  Obviously, our
> toolchain should be self-consistent.  It's silly for our
> compiler to only support Motorola syntax while gdb emits
> (only or by default) MIT syntax or vice versa.

You're right. Both GDB and objdump emit the MIT syntax by
default. Both of them use libbfd, and I believe it should
be possible to switch to the Motorola syntax, but I don't
know how.

Since the Motorola syntax is the GCC default for all
Linux targets, I wonder why GDB and objdump don't use
it too, at least for consistency. Shouldn't this be fixed?

-- 
  // Bernardo Innocenti - Develer S.r.l., R&D dept.
\X/  http://www.develer.com/

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