> Have people found that the gnu assembler (2.5.3) for the Alpha does
> some pretty wierd things ?

yup, all of those things it does weirdly.  and more, actually.

some of them bugged me in the past, e.g. it uses a different encoding
for "mb" than is specified as correct.  the correct one is 0x63ff4000,
gas generates 0x60004000...  of course, the both (currently) seem to
work the same way, so it doesn't hurt (yet).


gcc+gas also seems to generate some _really_ slow/unreadable code, at
least compared to the OSF/1 compiler+assembler.  (some of that's my
fault, because of the sleazy relocation support i hacked in, to
support large binaries...  but still, the code is a lot less readable;
i can reasonably hand-decompile OSF/1 cc+as assembly, and have a hard
time doing it for gcc+gas.


I hope to upgrade the tool chain that NetBSD/Alpha uses, some time in
the near future.  it might fix some of these problems (but no bets).


chris