Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!rutgers!rochester!cornell!batcomputer!sun!nelson
From: nelson@sun.soe.clarkson.edu (Russ Nelson)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc
Subject: Re: Microsoft Assembler
Message-ID: <271@sun.soe.clarkson.edu>
Date: 27 Jan 99 14:33:06 GMT
References: <1428@homxb.UUCP>
Organization: Clarkson University, Potsdam, NY
Lines: 23
In-reply-to: gemini@homxb.UUCP's message of 26 Jan 88 17:39:48 GMT
Posting-Front-End: GNU Emacs 18.47.5 of Mon Jan 25 1988 on sun.soe.clarkson.edu (berkeley-unix)

In article <1428@homxb.UUCP> gemini@homxb.UUCP (Rick Richardson) writes:
...
	   The UNIX-style assembler is smart enough to use short or long
	   jmp's, as well as to convert conditional jumps that would jump
	   more than 128 bytes to the opposite jump around a long jump.
The algorithms for doing this are well known, and easy to implement.  I
can only assume from the lack of them in MASM 5.0 that the programmers at
Microsoft don't feel any pressure from competing products.  Maybe if
Borland would come out with a Turbo assembler that *did* implement these
algorithms, then Microsoft would get on the ball.

	   We could find no way of doing this with the Microsoft 4.0 assembler.

   The question is: is it possible to get this sort of feature from the
   Microsoft 5.0 assembler?  is it possible to write a macro to do this?
   or is it just plain not possible with the Microsoft tools?

You can hack it up in a gross fashion but only for reverse jumps.
Just measure the distance between $ and the target, and issue the
appropriate code.  Unfortunately, there is no way to detect the usage
of this macro (and disable it) with a forward jump, and you will get
undefined symbol errors on pass 1.
-russ