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FASM's license (Announce)

posted by ecm Homepage E-mail, Düsseldorf, Germany, 16.09.2010, 00:03

> Tastes vary. Besides, too many small instructions on the far left make the
> source file VERY long with lots of blanks at the right edge. (Surely you
> don't comment every single line, do you?)
No, but I consider a "blank" right edge easier to read. I also insert blank lines to separate blocks of instructions that belong together. (Though the block size is usually > 5 instructions.)

> Also he made some shortcuts to
> simplify things (ax=1 ++di es=0B800h). It's really only if you like his
> style or just want to cram everything to be more dense, (arguably) easier
> to read.
        mov ax, 1
        inc di
        push 0B800h
        pop es

Is this what the above code would produce? I don't see such a shortening as better at all: "inc" is defined to affect flags, whereas with "++di" it's implicit; assuming my translation is correct. If the "compiler" works around this by using another instruction or saving the flags or remembering which instructions affected the flags, it arguably creates non-optimal code or does too much of its work behind the user's back. (Also I know that push imm is 186+ yeah.)

> Somewhat yes, but it wasn't that hard before! It's not like they
> forgot how they did it all these years. Besides, how hard can it be to just
> save/restore registers across calls? Not very.
Think 16 bit.

> "Should be", yeah, but never are. 32-bit assumptions, POSIX 2008,
> everything-is-*nix, etc.
Most of that should be possible to be worked around by the compiler - even if generating 16-bit code. The only problem is probably code size - can't fit no POSIX-compatible system in 1 MiB.

> Face it, DOS is (or was) widespread, lots of good software,
What? Yes, there was good software, but there was a lot of crap too. I relate that to how widespread it was. Everyone wrote DOS programs - of course most of them were not that good.

---
l

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