Re: Empirical data: assembly source vs. HLL source.

> [There's no reason that assemblers have to have awful syntax. About
> 30 years ago I used Niklaus Wirth's PL360, which was basically a S/360
> assembler with Algol syntax and a a little syntactic sugar like while
> loops that turned into the obvious branches. It really was an
> assembler, e.g., you had to write out your expressions with explicit
> assignments of values to registers, but it was nice. Wirth used it to
> write Algol W, a small fast Algol subset, which was a predecessor to
> Pascal. As is so often the case, Algol W was a significant
> improvement over many of its successors. -John]


See also COMFY (Baker97) and the 'compilers' COMFY-65 (Baker97a) and
COMFY-Z80, which provided a nice 'medium-level' language for
cross-compiling to 6502 and Z80s from PDP-10 Maclisp in 1976.


If one would take aboard the ideas of COMFY, and implemented them in a
current Common Lisp or Scheme (with macros), I think this would
provide a very nice assembler environment.


Regs, Pierre.


(Baker97) Baker, Henry G.: "COMFY -- A Comfortable Set of Control
Primitives for Machine Language Programming" ACM Sigplan Not. 32, 6
(June 1997), 23-27.


(Baker97a) Baker, Henry G.: "The COMFY 6502 Compiler" ACM Sigplan
Not. 32, 11 (November 1997), 25-30.


--
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