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From: bson@rice-chex.ai.mit.edu (Jan Brittenson)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.handhelds
Subject: Re: Saturn Mnemonics
Message-ID: <12098@life.ai.mit.edu>
Date: 29 Nov 90 23:19:29 GMT
References: <2470002@hparc0.HP.COM> <421@lysator.liu.se>
Sender: news@ai.mit.edu
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In article <421@lysator.liu.se> 
   howard@lysator.liu.se (MindWalker) writes:

 > 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.

   This is a funny statement. I think the first orthogonal
source-destination assembler I used was Macro-11, which dates from
1972 or so. The only element genuinely 68k in Alonzo's set is the dot,
which I find to be an abomination. A move byte should be called
"moveb" or "movb", without the dot. But it's still zillions of
lightyears ahead of HP's. If the alternative set wasn't invented,
someone would invent it. I would.

 > 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.

   Anyone interested in beta-testing STAR 1.01, which is a macro
assembler, can get it with anon FTP from @ai.mit.edu:
~/pub/star-1.01.tar.Z. It should compile fairly effortlessly on most
systems. It does general C-style arithmetic, and comes with an HP-48SX
Standard Macro Library, which implements macros for some common HP-48
objects.

   For HP compatibility, a macro libary to handle HP mnemonics is
planned. As is one for non-dot syntax. The HP compatibility requires
certain features - e.g. definable syntax - that currently do not
exist.