Older blog entries for helcio (starting at number 33)

PopAsm, the Popular Assembler project

PopAsm is doing fine. I have successfully added the preliminary version of forward symbols reference. More on that later.

Joystick

I have won some races with the joystick, but I then bought a new computer where neither of my joysticks work. I am seeking the cause of the problem. My guess it is the motherboard driver or its game port hardware...

I am back at Rio - Brazil. I hope I can resume working in my project soon (PopAsm, the Popular Assembler project).

I also bought a new joystick for driving racing games. The initial try was interesting despite I got the last rank in the easiest race :(

I have worked fine recently. Some people are sending interesting comments about the project. That's great. One of such comments suggest PopAsm to borrow an A86 feature that outputs assembly errors to the source files as comments, so they can be fixed easier. The feature will be added just after the first alpha version is released.

I have just found another project like PopAsm, the Popular Assembler. I will drop its author a line and see what happens.

Found bugs in some instruction tables entries. All have been fixed up. I believe I'll be done with the basic testing before monday. Because of the instruction set reference, the PopAsm User's Manual is near 150-pages long! Nice progress, eh?

More testing today. Too boring, but a necessary task to be performed. I have tested almost half of the instructions. I have noticed some bugs have escaped my "bug-hunting". All of them concern the order of the reg and r/m fields of an instruction when both arguments are registers. Some instructinos store such fields in reverse order, but I have not find any mention to that in Intel docs.

I will handle those bugs when I am done in testing the rest of the instructions. Should be a piece of cake.

I have tested several instructions today. Several silly bugs were found and removed. All tested instructions have been added to the Instruction Set Reference in the User's Manual.

I have tested several instructions today. Several small bugs have been found and fixed. The Developer's Manual is doing fine as well (it discusses the project source, NOT how to run it).

Blast! I have wasted nearly one hour of my developing time due to a bug in my compiler. I have managed to isolate it:

class Immediate
{
	template <int n, int t = 0>
	class IdFunctor {};
};

 int main ()
{
	return 0;
}

The output from the compiler is:

bug.cpp:4: redefinition of default argument for `int const t'
bug.cpp:3: original definition appeared here

Oddly enough, when I take the IdFunctor class out of Immediate class, the code compiles! Impressive!

I have just updated the homepage for PopAsm, the Popular Assembler Project. A new draft of the user's manual (91 pages) has been uploaded. It now includes data definition, unions, aggregates nesting and namespaces.