What JohnFound is trying to say (I belive) is that the right tool for the right occasion.
e.g: Task: place nail deep in wood pice <-- here a hammer is very good
Task: Extract the inner yellow part of an egg (don't know the english name "ägggula" is the swedish name for it) for use in baking a cake <-- here a hammer isn't that good, you'd risc getting pices of egg-shell in you cake...

Macros can be good, for instance when making the import section or so, it makes life eaiser, but using it for if statements is just overkill.

Dear Dickhead

Macros are not bad. What JohnFound said above is absolutely correct. You should use the right tool for the right thing. You can't use a hammer to "get yolk out of an egg" (if that's what you mean scientica).

Here i would also like to point that macros are not really a good answer for ifs..else.. and other high-level constructs. If you want to use high-level constructs try using HLA (but if you've already started with somethin else then you might find HLA a little confusing because of the variations in syntax. Ya know. mov eax, 01 is written as mov(01, eax) and such stuff). HLA btw generates good fasm code so you can use fasm and hla both.

Scientica:
Have been cooking lately? Get me some bacon and eggs please.
just kidding.

Regards,
Art

The opinion that macros are bad may come from the C language programmers, as there inline functions are recommended instead of macros, because macros don't support type checking. But this - of course - doesn't apply to assembly language! For the modern assembler macros are one of the most important and most used features.

i'm learning FASM just like you, and I am beginning to really appreciate this macros subsystem that FASM has. Privalov's really worked his ass out.

Gr8 work Privalov.

Regards,
Art

Actually I think its the other way around. I think its easier to understand HLA when you are familiar with another assembler than to move to another assembler from HLA. Maybe Randy Hyde thinks the same too.

well silkodyssey,

good for you, but i couldn't adjust myself to HLA because of the several syntax differences. I find the reverse order clumsy, and I can't stand C-style brackets for instructions.

There's absolutely no doubt that HLA is a very powerful assembler (or preprocessor), but it dont cater to my needs. That's exactly why Randy made available HLA4FASM and HLA4MASM. FASM has a very clear syntax so I think I will first test it thoroughly to check if it meets what I need and then if it does I'll stick with it.

Randy mentions in his book that HLA is for beginners and may not cater to the needs of programmers already familiar with other assemblers.

Regards,
Art

art_sands,

Well maybe its just me. If I understand something already it easier to understand how to do it with HLA but if I learn something with HLA its more annoying to have to translate it to another assembler .



I don't find it clumsy but i would still prefer the traditional syntax. About the brackets, I don't like them much either. When I use HLA I get a lot of syntax errors for missing brackets and missing semi-colons. This is one aspect of HLA I don't like. It reminds of my why I abandoned HLLs to learn asm. Their syntaxes are too complicated. I like fasm because it's syntax is simple and easy to read.

My main problem with HLA is its current implementation. It's too slow. When Randy writes an assembler for it I will consider making it my main asm programming tool again.



Yes thats right but HLA has a lot of advanced features that would be useful for asm coders but when someone already knows a tool they are usually reluctant to change. I think you said in another thread before that people don't like change.

Perhaps if Randy makes HLA an assembler and changes it to suit the FASM-style or proper Intel syntax, I will give it a try. But until then, I ain't gonna do that.

Will be waiting to see what Randy's cookin for version 2.0. He already has another book project on his hands.

Privalov is kind enough to provide us with his internals documentation. He said he was gonna concentrate on that and his own tutorial after he launched FASM 1.50. That's really great news. I like his writing style and presentation. I'll be waiting for that too. Hope he does it quickly.

Regards,
Art

To late to change the syntax now Maybe he could have created a masm compatible assembler. I mean an assembler with masm's syntax and most popular features for win32asm programming with some additinal high level features and a more powerful macro system. That way it would be easy for beginners and popular with the masm crowd too.

From looking at the hla4masm package with all the complicated macros to do what HLA can do easily I now understand why Randy had to write HLA in the first place. He said that masm's macro system was not powerful enough to do what create the ucr stdlib 2.0. Randy really needs to get to work on an HLA 2.0. But I don't suspect there'll by any or much new features, it will just rewritten to compile faster and generate object code so that it will be a real assembler . It will generate code for the other assemblers also.