Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!garfield!john13
From: john13@garfield.MUN.EDU (John Russell)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.tech
Subject: Best Assembler Development Environment
Keywords: asm assembler
Message-ID: <5051@garfield.MUN.EDU>
Date: 26 Dec 88 21:52:41 GMT
Organization: CS Dept., Memorial U. of Newfoundland, St. John's
Lines: 44

I am looking for opinions as to the best development environment for
someone programming in assembler, as I have recently started to experiment
with 68000 asm for writing Amiga programs. 

The options I know of so far are --

MetaComCo assembler: is this an actual product, or just a syntax spec?

Manx as: not as bad as I expected after a few initial problems; still lacking
	some options that I would like and some flexibility. Gurus occasionally.

Assempro: read bad reviews, not interested

ASM68k: on Fish disk #81, by Wesley Howe. I can't remember seeing any
	discussion of this on the net, but it has extensive and good
	documentation and a number of features I was hoping to find
	in my assembler-of-choice. Don't know about possible bugs, the
	docs indicate it should be reliable.

ASM:	on Fish disk #46, by Doug Leavitt Jr. Handles 68010 opcodes, and
	some of the same optimizations as ASM68k. Missing some opcode
	variants and many directives. Documentation provided is basically
	a listing of differences with the AmigaDOS manual.

GCC assembler: don't know if anyone has ported it to the Amiga. I've worked
	with it a bit on the Atari ST, but the syntax is very different
	from any of the others mentioned here so portability would be
	almost nil (unless a macro package was used to translate from
	one format to the other).

Right now I'm leaning towards ASM68k. The only BLink I have listed in my
disk catalog is the one included with the Draco distribution. Is there a
newer one? If so, what improvements are there?

All opinions are welcome. If you wish to post your views on any of these
assemblers, or on utilities you may know of which make assembly programming
more efficient, please also drop me a note via e-mail as our newsfeed is
very flakey.

John
-- 
"If you steal all money, kids not be able to BUY TOYS!"
			-- Saturday morning cartoon character explaining
			   why theft is bad