symbolic register names for MIPS

symbolic register names for MIPS

[William Lee Irwin III]

The patch at http://holomorphy.com/~wli/scripts/tc-mips.c.patch
implements some changes to accept symbolic register names like the
Algorithmics assembler, following the documentation given in
Patterson & Hennessy's "Computer Organization & Design: The Hardware
/ Software Interface", Appendix A, section A.6, Figure A.9, page A-23.

This makes assembly language programming on the MIPS architecture
somewhat easier for me. I hope it's useful for others as well.


Thanks,
Bill

Re: symbolic register names for MIPS

[Thiemo Seufer]

William Lee Irwin III wrote:
> The patch at http://holomorphy.com/~wli/scripts/tc-mips.c.patch
> implements some changes to accept symbolic register names like the
> Algorithmics assembler, following the documentation given in
> Patterson & Hennessy's "Computer Organization & Design: The Hardware
> / Software Interface", Appendix A, section A.6, Figure A.9, page A-23.

It makes some of these names illegal, this might break compatibility
to existing source. Btw, it looks like you have choosen $t0 $t1 etc,
not t0 t1 etc. It also does not work for new ABI names, breaking such
code surely.

> This makes assembly language programming on the MIPS architecture
> somewhat easier for me. I hope it's useful for others as well.

The solution I know of is to do defines via a preprocessor.
This circumvents the problem without losing much.


Thiemo