Re: Macros and K&R

[Ian Lance Taylor <ian at airs dot com>]

Boris Tschirschwitz <boris@math.ubc.ca> writes:

> Now, I don't know a lot about cpp, but I guess you couldn't use it to
> preprocess inline assmebly.

I agree.  The C preprocessor is not terribly useful for assembly
language, except for #include.  M4 works, but M4 itself is too
complicated.

> After all, some macro stuff did find its way into gas, and that's why I
> thought it did.

I added macro support to gas when I added MRI compatibility mode.  At
first I tried using gasp to handle MRI macros, but it was insufficient
for reasons I can not now recall.  So I copied the macro processing
from gasp into gas proper--macro.c, sb.c, and hash.c are shared by gas
and gasp.  Then since gas had macros in MRI mode, I added them in
normal mode as well.

Not too many people write a lot of straight assembler code these days,
so macro support in gas is not all that important.

Ian