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From: bright@dataioDataio.UUCP (Walter Bright)
Newsgroups: net.micro.pc
Subject: Quickie review of MASM 4.0
Message-ID: <885@dataioDataio.UUCP>
Date: Fri, 3-Jan-86 13:45:50 EST
Article-I.D.: dataioDa.885
Posted: Fri Jan  3 13:45:50 1986
Date-Received: Sat, 4-Jan-86 05:57:39 EST
Organization: Data I/O Corp., Redmond WA
Lines: 22

I just got my new copy of MASM 4.0, and here are some first impressions:

	1) It is indeed 3 times faster than MASM 3.0.
	2) It's about time that they added command line EQU's to it.
	   Trying to use one source file for several object files was
	   a real pain previously.
	3) Microsoft still doesn't support local labels. Local labels
	   have been around on most assemblers for the last 15 years
	   (notably DEC's assemblers). Local labels are labels that
	   have a restricted scope, i.e. they only exist between
	   definitions of other labels. They have the same advantages
	   that local variables in high level languages do (better
	   modularity, reduced symbol table usage, faster compilation).
	4) At last, the assembler prints out the line number of where
	   syntax errors occured. For large files, sometimes it became
	   very difficult to find where the error was with the old MASM.
	   However, the new MASM no longer prints out the source line
	   to the screen that had the error in it. Boo.
	5) The include filename pseudo-op seems to be broken. I can't
	   get it to accept them without issueing a warning about
	   'extra characters on line'. It worked fine on the old
	   assembler. Anybody know what's going on?