rb 1 - 2 bad_token 3    

rb 2 - 1 bad_token    

Another unintuitive thing I ran into was that

Code:

rb 1 - 2 bad_token 3    

errors with "value out of allowed range" but not "extra characters on line" (even after increasing the error limit) which would have helped me figure out the actual issue much faster. Note that

Code:

rb 2 - 1 bad_token    

does indeed error with "extra characters on line". In hindsight, the out of range error makes sense, but I'm not sure that it should suppress the extra characters error.

Also, a few minor syntactical features from other compilers and assemblers that would be nice, but not strictly necessary and aren't really worth writing a macro for:
binary literals: %1, 0b1
octal literals: @7, 0o7 (or 0c7 because o looks like 0)

\ followed by anything but whitespace and a comment acts like a newline (this is often used in z80 code for things like rrca \ rrca \ rrca \ rrca).

Is there any reason that a postpone ? block would be executed before all other values are resolved? Maybe I'm misunderstanding its purpose, but I'm trying to avoid a very slow loop that is the result of an unresolved variable evaluating to 0, but the loop really only needs to be executed once after the last pass.

is for fasmg can be added version log?: what is done (like it done in fasm1).

The "postpone ?" needs not to define any constant or variables that may affect the other parts of source, because this is going to mess up the resolving and the additional passes are going to be needed.

a = b
b = 1 shl 24
postpone ?
    repeat b - a
    end repeat
end postpone    

Please try it with the "hvjms" version.

macro ? temp&
    purge ?
    macro ?! line&
        display `line, 10
        line
    end macro
    temp
end macro
include 'test.inc'
purge ?    

Is it intentional for macro ? to get the lines of an included file but for macro ?! to skip them?

I can sort of get around this with an interesting trick, but I still miss any unconditional macros at the top of the included file (...)

macro ?! line&

        match =INCLUDE? path, line
                local text
                virtual
                        db 'macro ?! l&',10
                        db '  display `l, 10',10
                        db '  l',10
                        db 'end macro',10
                        file path
                        db 10,'purge ?'
                        load text:$-$$ from $$
                end virtual
                eval text
        else match =PURGE names, line
                purge names
        else match any, line
                display 'Ignored: ',`any,13,10
        end match

end macro

include 'test.inc'    

I also just realized that trying to use macro ?! to parse syntax like .endif isn't going to work anyway since conditionally excluded lines aren't sent to macro ?!, so I will have to try something else.

The eval trick doesn't actually work in my case because I'm using a local namespace so once you enter the include file, there's currently no way to even define an unconditional macro without preexisting context which eval would destroy.

However, since I need neither label sizes nor dot-prefix style local labels, and since I will probably need to customize label defines anyway, I decided that it is easier to just redirect "label:" to "label := $" so that macros starting with a dot work anywhere inside the included file.

jacobly wrote:

On an unrelated note, I was having problems understanding and debugging multiple pass issues, so I ended up creating a debug version of fasmg that outputs the display buffer every pass (usually with a small pass limit < 10 or so). This was so invaluable that I was thinking maybe it could be added as a command line argument.

It would be an interesting option to have. Perhaps I could add it as another level to "-v" switch ("-v2"?).

fasmg nul -iDisplay(120)