Re: Optimizing in assembly language

:> So here's my question: why can't we write an "optimizing assembler"
:> that lets the programmer specify machine sequences and the assembler
:> does the same kinds of "book keeping" that a HLL compiler would do.


Slightly off topic, but a year or two ago we wrote some reverse
assembly tools for a DSP
(http://www.cs.rhul.ac.uk/research/languages). One of the side effects
of this work was an exhastive dataflow analysis of the human-written
assembler source, and this identified all registers that were in use
in a function, and more importantly all registers which were live
across the sum of all function calls for a particular function. This
allowed register mis-use to be easily identified.


I haven't written assembler in real anger for a few years, but a tool
like that would have saved many programmer days of effort. I wonder
why assemblers don't come with good dataflow analysis tools?


                                                              Adrian


--
Dr Adrian Johnstone, Senior Lecturer in Computing, Computer Science Dep,
Royal Holloway, University of London, Egham, Surrey, TW20 0EX, England.
Email a.johnstone@rhul.ac.uk Tel:+44(0)1784 443425 Fax:+44(0)1784 439786

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