Comment by kstrauser

Comment by kstrauser 2 days ago

I meant something defined in the assembler along the lines of

  .macro ZEROAX
    xor eax, eax
  .endm

where it was defined with a semantically meaningful name, but emitting the exact same opcodes as when writing it out. I mean, I guess taking that to the logical extreme, you'd end up with... C. I dunno, it just seemed like the sort of thing that would have caught on my convention.

I use to write lots of 6502 and 68k assembler, and 68k especially tended to look quite human-readable by the time devs ended up writing macros for everything. Perhaps that wasn't the same culture around x86 asm, which I admit I've done far, far less of.

sfink 2 days ago

Right, that's what I was thinking in my 2nd paragraph. No real reason not to, I suspect it just conflicted with the mindset of cleverness that you had to have for other reasons. Macros for >1 instruction would be fine, macros for 1 instruction would be looked down on because you haven't joined the club by twisting your brain into knots.

> I use to write lots of 6502 and 68k assembler, and 68k especially tended to look quite human-readable by the time devs ended up writing macros for everything.

Yes. I only did nontrivial amounts of 6502 and x86, but from what I saw of 68k, it seemed like it started out cleaner-looking and more readable even before adding in macros. (Or for all I know, I was reading code using built-in macros.)

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