ia64: @ not allowed to start symbol?

[James E Wilson]

On Mon, 2005-01-31 at 09:06, Jan Beulich wrote:
> Is it intentional that one cannot have a symbol starting with @ in IA64
> assembly sources? While these may conflict with current or future pseudo
> operands, ias permits them.

An oversight.  Gas probably hasn't ever been rigorously checked against
post-release Intel Assembly Language manuals.

I see the IAS manual allows any of the special characters "._$@?" to be
the first character of a symbol.  "." and "_" are common in unix.  "$"
appears in VMS and old K&R C code.  The "@" and "?" have me puzzled
though.  I don't know why anyone would want or need them as the first
character of an identifier, though I see that the netware,
interix, and PE targets allow one or both of them, so it must be a
Windows convention.

Gas gets both the @ and ? cases wrong, and should be fixed if we want to
conform to IAS, or if someone needs them.  We get the other cases right.
-- 
Jim Wilson, GNU Tools Support, http://www.SpecifixInc.com