Aaron wrote:

>On Wed, 31 Jul 2002, Dan Ingalls wrote:
>
>  
>
>>This reminded me that, about ten years ago I wrote in a day or two a
>>little assembler for a simple processor.
>>
>>Anyway, since I said "a page or two", I thought I should put my money
>>where my mouth is, so I'm sending along that old code.  Unfortunately
>>it's for a slightly different dialect from Squeak, but most of the code
>>should still work if you file off the rough edges.  There's nothing
>>great about it, but if people think assemblers are hard, this should
>>help to allay that fear.
>>    
>>
>
>Fun! I'll have to play with it.
>
>People think assemblers are hard?  I always imagined that it'd be a lot
>easier to write an assembler than a compiler.  I'm a biologist, not a
>computer scientist or elec engineer, but I always thought that you don't
>do more than superficial optimization within an assembler, but simply
>translate human-readable opcodes, like translating "returnTop" in SqVM
>assembly to the byte 7C.
>
>Aaron
>
>  
>
It definitely used to be a lot easier to write an assembler than a compiler.  Once upon I did an assembler for a 6502 (Apple II), and it wasn't that difficult, but my stab at compilers ... shudder.  (Well, it was fun, but it sure wasn't a quality compiler, and it took most of a quarter.)





-- 
-- Charles Hixson
Gnu software that is free,
The best is yet to be.