some ideas to gnu as

[Nick Clifton]

Hi Miro,

   Thanks for the feedback.

> 1. Local labels. I don't know where comes the idea of gnu as' local 
> labels from but it's something totally different I'm using everyday. 

> etc. You see the idea -- I can use dotted prefix in every local label, 
> it's not explicitly exported much like gnu as L-labels but I can reuse 
> the name in every new block! It's extremely handy when you have let's 
> say 20 subroutines in one asm file and every of that routines has some 
> simple loop -- so instead of creating labels like routine1_loop I use 
> just ".loop" everywhere. Quite handy, isn't it?

Is that really so different from GAS's local labels ?  With gas you can 
use, eg "1:" in place of ".loop" and then just refer to the most recent 
definition with "1b". Not a lot of difference from the way you are using 
local labels.


> 2. "|" comments. I know, there's --bitwise-or option but in this case 
> "#" has to be used as comment (I don't count /* */ because it's quite 
> unpractical for one line comments and "//" doesn't work) and this is 
> very confusing with using of "#" for immediate constants... Is there any 
> reason why ";" and "*" symbols aren't used for this?

They certainly can be.  But GAS is often hampered by the fact that it 
needs to be compatible with the assembler syntax specified by the CPU 
builder and this syntax often uses these characters for other purposes.

  (at least for this platform where it's really standard?)

Have a look at the definitions of line_comment_chars and 
line_separator_chars in gas/config/tc-m68k.c.  You will see that 
currently ";" is used as a line separator, so changing it to a 
comment-start character would probably break lots of peoples assembler 
sources.  The "*" character however is already set up to be a line 
comment character, so you should be able to use it for comments.

Of course one of the great things about free software is that you have 
access to the source code, so you can modify it to suit your own needs...

Cheers
   Nick