Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!usc!wuarchive!uunet!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!ucbvax!panisse.berkeley.edu!dcdeno From: dcdeno@panisse.berkeley.edu (D. Curtis Deno) Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc.misc Subject: Re: Masm V6 Keywords: MASM assembler Microsoft Message-ID: <42076@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU> Date: 8 May 91 00:30:34 GMT References: <1991May6.164522.8695@digi.lonestar.org> Sender: nobody@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU Reply-To: dcdeno@panisse.berkeley.edu (D. Curtis Deno) Followup-To: comp.sys.ibm.pc.misc Distribution: comp Organization: International Computer Science Institute, Berkeley Lines: 52 >From article , by pbg@cs.brown.edu (Peter Galvin): >> I just received an add from Microsoft for Masm 6.0. It's an upgrade >> offer, and would cost me $75 to go from 5.1. This is the first I've >> heard of 6.0. Does anyone know if it is out yet? What it's list >> price is? Thanks. > >I just got my offer also. Since I originally paid about $65 for masm 5.1 >I very seriously doubt that I will upgrade. I saw a headline about 6.0 >coming out, but have not had the time to read the article - don't know what >the upgrade gets me (also haven't read the stuff with the upgrade offer - >just enough to get the price). I will probably "upgrade" to tasm anyway - >all the rest of my tools are going that way, mainly because the quality I attended the MASM 6.0 public/press unveiling at the San Jose Convention Center on 4/30/91 (part of some sort of Corporate Developers Conference put on by Microsoft). As luck would have it, I got MASM 6.0 for a door prize that night. Its up on my 386 system now. A careful read of the upgrade glossy covers the main improvements/changes. On the plus side, if you already work with MS C 6.00A and PWB 1.1 (the integrated development environment) MASM nows joins C 6.00 and BASIC 7.0 with good on-line help, examples, documentation. I smiled when during the question period Microsoft admitted that omitting the printed docs with C 6.0 was a mistake ("we heard you" the man explained). The other major goodie for me is the strong integration of a mixed C/MASM programming environment. C prototypes and structures now have direct MASM counterparts and MASM 6.0 can translate a .h file to a .inc file. They were also excited about the sparsity of NOPs due to a n-pass assembler that could arrange things better. The near/far conditional jump restrictions of the Intel architecture they claimed to have overcome by reordering the conditional test and jumps. Although MASM 6.0 can work with 32-bit addresses and has 486 specific support, it does not come with a DOS extender or linker to permit true flat 32-bit code executables by itself. The MASM 6.0 package includes the same PWB 1.1 as in the MS C 6.00A upgrade, but does offer a more recent set of utilities: the linker, CodeView, and the smartdrive/ramdrive/himem group. I installed the DOS only stuff with examples and full help docs and it ate up about 4Mb, though I could trim about 0.5-1 Mb in redundant stuff from C 6.00, Windows 3.0, ... I'm not crazy about programming in assembler anymore. I have found that inline assembler works very well for me. I don't need the new, expanded MACRO extensions in MASM 6.0 that offer high level conditional constructs like C or Pascal. All in all, I'm glad to have it. The upgrade price of $75 is about what I could justify, but I'm sure your mileage will vary. -- Curt Deno dcdeno@united.Berkeley.EDU grad student and part-time software developer