At Thu, 17 Jul 2025 01:02:21 +0530 (GMT+05:30), Mohan <manmshuk%gmail.com@localhost> wrote: Subject: unix assembly programming > > is it common to use m4 with gas? are there examples > i can learn from or just general resources for unix asm > programming? In my experience everyone doing assembly language programming in modern Unix and Unix-like environments seems to use the C preprocessor for anything macro-like. It's a very poor solution, but it does the basic things cleanly enough and is terribly easy to integrate, and is generally portable enough. It can be used to do a lot, e.g.: https://github.com/WestfW/structured_gas I'd somehow never heard of "gasp", but then again I've never used the GNU assembler other than maybe once or twice to test if it could assemble something I wrote. It looks useful. My favourite macro assembler was MACRO-11, for the PDP-11 (my favourite machine to write assembler for!). There's a version of it available in ancient BSD archives, however it only knows PDP-11 op codes. DEC may have had a version for VAX, but I only ever used PDP emulation on a VAX for assembler -- I don't think I ever wrote any native VAX assembler. I didn't really ever do a lot with it's macro capabilities, but I really liked it overall. I would emphatically NOT use m4 as a macro processor for assembler. I'm sure it would work, and would be able to do "interesting" things, but I think it's too general purpose and probably too finicky (too expressive) to be actually useful in the things one might want it to do when writing assembler. -- Greg A. Woods <gwoods%acm.org@localhost> Kelowna, BC +1 250 762-7675 RoboHack <woods%robohack.ca@localhost> Planix, Inc. <woods%planix.com@localhost> Avoncote Farms <woods%avoncote.ca@localhost>
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