assembler man pages ?

[Jim Blandy]

Mike Frysinger <vapier@gentoo.org> writes:
> for example, say i wanted quick info on the 'jne' instruction, i would do `man 
> jne` and get back a reference page similar to `man 2 close`

You're right that something like this would be the nicest interface to
an assembly reference manual.  Even the indexed PDF's (what I use,
like DJ) are a pain compared to the beauty of something like `C-h f'
when writing Emacs Lisp code in Emacs (the documentation for the
function the cursor is sitting on a call to pops up).

But it's a question of pragmatics: what's the interface, what's the
structure, and how do you get the information into it?  You'd pretty
much need to have chip vendors cooperating with you, because nobody's
going to retype all that.  It's boring enough doing the opcodes
library and the GCC machine description.