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From: poser@csli.Stanford.EDU (Bill Poser)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.misc
Subject: Re: Aggressive optimization
Message-ID: <16101@csli.Stanford.EDU>
Date: 30 Oct 90 04:39:52 GMT
References: <2060@aber-cs.UUCP> <65592@lanl.gov> <2677@l.cc.purdue.edu> <MEISSNER.90Oct25130214@osf.osf.org> <12175@ganymede.inmos.co.uk>
Reply-To: poser@csli.stanford.edu (Bill Poser)
Organization: Center for the Study of Language and Information, Stanford U.
Lines: 15

In article <12175@ganymede.inmos.co.uk> conor@inmos.co.uk (Conor O'Neill) writes:
>When I was first taught any computer science, I was taught that an assembler
>performed a one-to-one translation of assembly language mnemonics to
>machine instructions. I like, and can understand, that definition.

>Am I the only programmer who wishes that MIPS hadn't "corrupted" the word
>"assembler", but had used some other term instead?

Fancy assemblers have been around for a long time. Consider the
VAX assembler (the DEC one, not the UNIX one), which had the pseudo-op
JBR which was translated into a JMP or BRanch instruction depending on
how far away the target ended up, and allowed a high-level specification
of the register save mask for subroutine calls, so you didn't have to
figure it out in binary. Or the MACRO assembler for DEC 20s, which
had all sorts of high-level stuff. It was practically an HLL.