Re: [Nasm-devel] Feature request: fine-grain control over instruction encoding forms

[Brian R. <bre...@mu...>]

> Third, covering all the cases and making them work with the matching
> engine could take a fair bit of time.

I think this is the biggest issue. I actually suggested something like
this to Jules way back in 1998 or so. (Though my suggestion was to
introduce just one new prefix keyword, e.g. "alt", that would cause
nasm to use the less-common variant encoding for the following
instruction. Of course that falls apart for cases that have three
possible encodings.) He was vaguely sympathetic to the idea, but I
think he felt (rightly) that it was a fair bit of work for the amount
of payoff (particularly if future upkeep is taken into account).

b