Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!lll-winken!lll-lcc!ames!nrl-cmf!cmcl2!brl-adm!brl-smoke!gwyn
From: gwyn@brl-smoke.ARPA (Doug Gwyn )
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: Portable "asm" (Was: The D Programming Language)
Message-ID: <7401@brl-smoke.ARPA>
Date: 2 Mar 88 18:35:54 GMT
References: <11702@brl-adm.ARPA> <243@eagle_snax.UUCP> <2245@geac.UUCP> <1988Feb25.203425.8925@utzoo.uucp> <689@l.cc.purdue.edu> <2738@mmintl.UUCP>
Reply-To: gwyn@brl.arpa (Doug Gwyn (VLD/VMB) <gwyn>)
Organization: Ballistic Research Lab (BRL), APG, MD.
Lines: 15

In article <2738@mmintl.UUCP> franka@mmintl.UUCP (Frank Adams) writes:
>Clearly, assembler statements should have been defined as:
>#asm <statement>
>instead of
>asm("statement");

A properly-designed system programming language should not have such
a feature at all.  (It is not guaranteed in C, either.)  The interface
between the optimized code produced for the HLL and the in-line
assembly code is quite problematic.  Also, the compiler should not be
forced to have an assembler built-in just to handle such stuff; many
compilers directly generate relocatable object code.

If there is some feature that might be worth having asm() for, for
example "rotate" instructions, then consider designing it into the
HLL.