Re: [PATCH] gas: retain whitespace between strings

[Nick Clifton <nickc@redhat.com>]

Hi Jan,

> Change the scrubber to retain such whitespace, by making the processing
> of strings more similar to that of symbols. And indeed this appears to
> make sense when taking into account that for quite a while gas has been
> supporting quoted symbol names.

OK, that makes sense.

> Taking a more general view, however, the change doesn't go quite far
> enough. There are further cases where significant whitespace is removed
> by the scrubber. The new testcase enumerates a few in its ".if 0"
> section. I'm afraid the only way that I see to deal with this would be
> to significantly simplify the scrubber, such that it wouldn't do much
> more than collapse sequences of unquoted whitespace into a single blank.
> To be honest problems in this area aren't really surprising when seeing
> that there's hardly any checking of .macro use throughout the testsuite
> (and in particular in the [relatively] generic tests under all/).

Plus assembler macro syntax has never been that well specified.


> Partly RFC: While I did test this for x86, I didn't get around yet to
> run a much wider set of tests.

I ran my regression tester with the patch applied and nothing turned up,
so I am happy to approve the patch.  One thing though - I think that it
would be a good idea to extend the documentation to cover this behaviour.
I do not mind if you do that as a separate patch, or just an extension
to this one, but I think that it should be done.

Cheers
   Nick