From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: hjl@lucon.org (H.J. Lu) To: ian@cygnus.com (Ian Lance Taylor) Cc: gas2@cygnus.com, kunimart@pit.ktu.lt Subject: Re: A PREFIX_SEPARATOR bug in binutils 2.9 Date: Tue, 21 Apr 1998 12:39:00 -0000 Message-id: References: <199804211911.PAA05010@subrogation.cygnus.com> X-SW-Source: 1998/msg00166.html > Evidently gcc does not generate code of this form, or this would have > been noticed long ago. > > Note that there is another way to accomplish this: > data16 > mov foo,%eax > > I tried the test case > data16/mov foo,%eax > on the UnixWare assembler, and it failed there as well. In fact, the > reason gas uses '/' to start a comment for i386 ELF is because that is > how the UnixWare assembler behaves. > > Putting data16 on a separate line, as above, works with both gas and > the UnixWare assembler. > > I don't know if the UnixWare assembler permits you to specify a prefix > on the same line as an instruction. I tried a few other characters, > but I couldn't find anything that worked. > > So I'm not sure whether we need to change anything here. > If we don't change, PREFIX_SEPARATOR is just a dummy for x86/ELF. If someone writes some asm code for both ELF/a.out and use '/' as PREFIX_SEPARATOR, the error may not be discovered at the assembly time. Martynas Kunigelis found this while working on 16bit support in gas. Since PREFIX_SEPARATOR has never really been used and has never worked, I suggest we change it to somethin else. Martynas used '\\' for x86/ELF. But I don't like it. On the other hand, I haven't found one I really like. I guess I can live with '\\'. We can just define PREFIX_SEPARATOR as '\\' for all x86. At least, it will work if someone really wants to use it. Thanks. -- H.J. Lu (hjl@gnu.org)