RFC: PR 31964: Add .base64 pseudo-op to gas

[Nick Clifton]

Hi Jan,

> The doc addition presently suggests that only one or two strings can
> be supplied, due to there not being any use of @dots{}. 

Oops - sorry about that.

> further wonder
> in how far it is necessary to require comma separated arguments. This
> is because of me observing, in the doc change, that e.g. .ascii and
> .asciz don't require commas as separators.

Actually they do, although this is not indicated in their one-line description
in the menu section of the document.

> Requiring commas certainly
> has positive aspects (see my scrubber work to deal with e.g. macro
> arguments not having such a requirement), so the question is mainly wrt
> possible concerns towards overall consistency.

I think that the patch is being consistent with commas.  The place where it
is inconsistent is in the handling of multiple double quote enclosed strings
which are not separated by commas.  For example:

   .asciz "hello" "world"
   .base64 "hello" "world"

The .ascii directive will be accepted and will produce a single zero-terminated
string "helloworld".  Whereas the .base64 directive will reject the input, saying
that there is junk at the end of the line, starting with the third double quote
character.

To be honest, I prefer this behaviour for the .base64 pseido-op.  It keeps the
code simple, and since we are not dealing with human-readable strings, the need
for compatibility with the behaviour of string handling in C compilers is not
there.  (At least in my opinion).

Cheers
   Nick