[Nasm-devel] merging two NASM branches

[<kd...@ne...>]

Hello nasm-developers,

Just want to point you out that there is a parralel branch 
of NASM
developement. SciTech (and particulary Kendall Bennet) are 
doing
some improvements. They have their latest sources on their 
Perforce
server (this is a kind of ugly<imho> CVS).

Also I am the author of nasm 0.98e that is on 
linuxgames.com (you have
a remark about it on your "news" page). I have already 
integrated my
latest patches into the SciTech"s version of NASM. I would 
like to
propose to join our efforts since there is no much sense in 
making
a branch of NASM. Moreover, neither me or SciTech have big 
interest
in maintaining the "latest NASM" so if we could donate our 
changes
to some team which will take further care of NASM I 
personally (and
I"m almost sure Kendall as well) will be happy. We both are 
going
to make further improvements to NASM from time to time but 
for both
me nor Kendall this is not going to become the MainTime 
Project
(its rather a MeanTime project). We just need NASM for our 
projects
(I need it for Crystal Space project and Kendall for his 
MGL project).

A short description of changes made by scitech:
- they added a TASM-compatible mode, that is, you may 
compile
same code (with several precautions) with both TASM and 
NASM. It is a
subset of Tasm"s IDEAL mode and is enabled by an additional
command-line switch "-t". Without "-t" NASM acts absolutely 
as before.
They need such a mode for their MGL graphics library which 
can be
compiled with both TASM and NASM.

On my part of changes, I have fixed some things in OMF 
output routines
(I had problems with using Nasm"s object files under OS/2), 
added some
new preprocessor defines (I have added %undef long time 
before 0.98
came out, also I added %xdefine and %ixdefine which are 
like %define
but expands the macros immediately, that is:

%assign a 5
%xdefine b a
%assign a=a+1

This will define "b" to "5", while if I would use simply %
define, it
would expand to latest value of a, in above case to "6".

Also I have added the %+ pseudo-operator for concatenating 
substrings
in %define and alike. Example:

%define cextern(x) _ %+ x
cextern (myfunc)

The second line will expand to _myfunc. There was no 
universal way to
do above job in NASM 0.98, thus this improvement.

Besides above changes, I have fixed a large number of NASM 
bugs I have
encountered while using NASM for Crystal Space project (we 
have a lot
of assembly code there, about 150K).

-- 
Best regards,
 Andrew Zabolotny

P.S. I"m not at home now (I"m even in other city) but my 
email
address is bi...@el.... Please answer there as I won"t 
have access
to the email account I am writing from. I will be there at 
the end of
this week, I hope. I will join this mailing list ASAP, but 
until
Monday please don"t reply me on the list.

P.P.S. I will ask also Kendall about merging together our 
NASM brand
with your. I don"t think he will object.