cgen fundamentals

[David Carney]

Hey,

I was referred to cgen by a member of the binutils mailing list (Nick 
Clifton).  Being (virtually) a complete newbie to Scheme programming and 
cgen, I have a number of fairly fundamental questions that are likely best 
answered through this list, rather than trying to find information on the 
web... 

Basically, I'm a hardware engineer with a background in chip design, some 
board design, and a fair bit of embedded (C) programming.  I spent a day or 
two week teaching myself the basics of scheme, but I'm still confused about 
the exactly purpose of cgen.  I.e. what's the purpose of a 'gas' versus an 
'opcodes' port?  What does cgen actually produce (and how do I produce and 
use it) ?  How do files created with cgen interface with binutils?

All I want to do is have an assembler which dumps out object files for a 
simple, non-pipelined, 16-bit processor.  Could anyone give me some pointers 
on  where I should begin and/or how I should proceed?

A lowly hardware engineer,

Dave Carney