Hi!
I would suggest to add into fasm such embedded commands:

shell_exec_before "command" - executes command via shell before assembling
shell_exec_after "command" - executes command after assembling
shell_exec_result - numeric variable to get last result of execution (?)

this will let to keep multystage operation in one asm source, for
example, compile rc or scan import before assembling and link or
pack exe after assembling without batch files. maybe, keeping result
will help also, but then i do not know how to process it proper due to
stage of assembling, eg. abort on shell_exec_result ~eq 0 (?)

regards!

shell_exec... "command" - abort on non-zero return
and
shell_exec.. "command" ignore - to ignore non-zero return

It's much more clever to use the make utility! which can handle every of your issues and many more.

The commands would be OS dependent and thus not work in lots of cases. What is wrong with a simple batch file anyway?

Not necessarily. You could be using GCC or some other multi platform software that is available on the command line for programmers who use the software.

If someone wants to make the commands themselves platform dependent then that would be their option but it doesn't always mean that it is going to be the case.

I agree though that using make is more sensible for such things though.

make and batch ways are known to me . but how do you plan start them, say, from fasmw? the idea is to support simple sequence directly from source, say, to build windows application, when you may need rc compilation/conversion before assembling, and possible linking after assembling. agree, it's not too important (personally i do not need it at all from IDE), but i thought it is easy to implement and handy to users who use fasmw only.

Sounds like a bad idea to me... such commands don't really belong in an assembler (or a compiler, for that matter).


Simple: use a better editor, or a fully-fledged IDE.