Re: generic assembly language available?

Ray Dillinger wrote:
> ChokSheak Lau wrote:
>
>>I think what you have is the closest to what I am looking for
>>(except it is not freeware), anyway, i am not sure whether the
>>idea of having a generic low-level language (much much lower
>>than C) is possible at all or not.
>
>
> For what it's worth, there is no problem with using C as a misspelled
> assembly language. Since C is semantically similar to a superset of
> assemby, you can have just about any feature you'd want in a "generic
> assembly language" just by deciding which features of C you will not
> use.
>
> I did this a couple of years ago for a LISP compiler that emitted C
> code; the code it emitted used goto's and handled its stack
> explicitly. It used no C procedure calls or other C-stack based
> control structures and it was effectively a generic assembly language.
>
> Bear
> [Lots of languages use C as a portable low-level back end. -John]


I would say that an assembler that doesn't know about overflow is
lacking some features... :-)


I added this missing feature to lcc-win32, a "portable assembler" for
many languages (Eiffel, objective C, Heron, C++ and maybe others)


All in all I think C should introduce this feture:


a*=b;
if (_overflow())
// overflow handling.
In x86 machines, intrinsic functions that get translated to
single machine instructions are handy, like _rdtsc() that will
return a 64 bit integer with the cycles of the processor, or others

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