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From: howard@lysator.liu.se (MindWalker)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.handhelds
Subject: Re: Saturn Mnemonics
Message-ID: <421@lysator.liu.se>
Date: 29 Nov 90 11:51:45 GMT
References: <2470002@hparc0.HP.COM>
Sender: news@isy.liu.se (Lord of the News)
Organization: Lysator Computer Club, Linkoping University, Sweden
Lines: 43

grahamf@hparc0.HP.COM (Graham Fraser) writes:


>Why are people re-inventing the wheel,  and developing their own sets of 
>Saturn mnemonics ???   There seems to be at least two sets being circulated
>at the moment,  and neither follows the HP mnemonics.

As far as I know, there two sets are: The MC68000 inspired set and HP's own.

The reson for adopting the MC68000 inspired set (as detailed by Alonzo in his
HP28S PROCESSOR NOTES) is that HP's own set is so God-awful ugly. It's like
Basic with bit manipulation thrown in. I don't mean to be insulting to HP,
but I can't get used to the idea that those mnemonics represent machine code.

Apart from it's lack of estetics, I for one am used to the 8080/Z80, MC68000
style instructions were you have an op-code followed by one or more operands.
It makes for easy reading and spacious listings.

With HP's style (as can be seen in Mier-J's book CUSTOMIZE YOUR HP28) there
is less uniformity. You also tend to get rather odd listings, and it just
doesn't _look_ like assembler code.

Again, another reason is that, to my knowledge, there is no free HP-mnemonic
assembler available, whereas at least one (ASAP) exists for Alonzo-style
mnemonics, and I know that several more are being written.

I certainly feel more at home with Alonzo's set of instructions and apparently
so do most of the other mc programmers on this newsgroup too, since all code
that I have seen has been written using this instruction set.

Who says that just because HP use one (rather odd) set of mnemonics, that that
set _has_ to be the best ??  OK, they may have invented it first, and it may
be the one used internally (within HP that is), but that doesn't necessitate
that we must conform to that standard. Besides, HP have as much access to
the free Alonzo-mnemonic assemblers as the rest of us ;-) ;-) (Though most come
with the restriction that they must _not_ be used for commercial software).

/MHd
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