Nice! I'll give it a try. Thank you! Does the Funk build include all the macros as directives? Meh, I guess I'll just go see.

No just the compiler . Lib is still on top.

Wonderful wonderful assembler, but I think I found a bug or two. It won't let you compile a file with "#include"s when the folder path to SPASM includes special characters. (In my case I tried to use "→")

I apologize if I missed the answer to this question on IRC yesterday: does SPASM-ng have some equivalent of Brass's .incbin? Also, I think a directive reference for SPASM[-ng] would be extremely helpful, and if I get a chance, I'd be happy to help.

Edit: Runer112 has kindly indicated on IRC that #import is the answer.

Edit #2: I originally thought that the Emscripten'd SPASM-ng and/or SourceCoder had a bug causing the following issue, but it turns out that it happens with the Windows build as well. The issue has two parts:
1) The listing file has the listing file title line about 10-50 lines into the file, rather than at the top.
2) The listing file title line mentions one of the #included files in a project that #includes files, rather than the top-level .asm file. For example:

Code:

*bump* More bug reports! If you have X .equ Y in a program any time after .org, SPASM equates X to the address at which the .equ appears, which I didn't discover as the cause of some inexplicably crashing code until I did some sleuthing into the list file. That's pretty broken: it's not a label, SPASM.

Edit: Thanks to Tari, we have an MWE that replicates my problem. This should emit an error, and silently performs undefined behavior instead:
Code:

Actually, I think this is perfectly fine behavior. Since A is not prefixed with whitespace, it is treated as a label. This is handy if you wish to do this:


Code:


Also, spasm has many, many useful directives and macros that can add pretty much any functionality you desire:

https://wabbit.codeplex.com/wikipage?title=SPASM%20Directives&referringTitle=Documentation
https://wabbit.codeplex.com/wikipage?title=SPASM%20Internal%20Functions&referringTitle=Documentation
https://wabbit.codeplex.com/wikipage?title=SPASM%20Preprocessor&referringTitle=Documentation
http://www.omnimaga.org/asm-language/spasm-macros/?wap
http://z9.invisionfree.com/omnimaga/ar/t1647.htm

That's a weird overload, and breaks at least a few rules. Labels must be followed by a colon which that one is not, and even if you assume that's a legal label the .equ should be an error because it's not doing anything.

Haha, sure it is Labels are not at all required to have colons, and this is basically telling the assembler that the label exists at the current address, which is 0. This is a nice go-between for the ZDS assembler and spasm, as it does not require a .org anywhere, and can be assigned to an arbitrary address.

Mateo: I should clarify, since I don't think it was clear, that SPASM-ng does what I expect it to if I change where the define is:
Code:
In the "wrong" case, the assembler is realizing it doesn't know what B + 3 is, then seemingly silently discarding the .equ B + 3. In the "correct" case (the one in this post), it properly interprets this as a .equ.

Ah, that makes a lot more sense Yeah, there should be a warning generated or something. Hm.

There should be an option to automatically replace jp with jr whenever possible.

This is not the job of an assembler, nor should it be. An assembler should translate assembly exactly as specified into machine code. I don't believe that there's any easy way that spasm could implement such a feature anyway.

If you wanted such behavior, although I would suggest that you really shouldn't, you could probably make a macro that works for backwards jumps.

It should be easy. Just check if the jump is within the 256 byte range, and if it is, change it to jr to save memory and a few clock cycles.

If it is so easy, you should write the code for it \o/ Anywho, this is not the purpose of an assembler. This is more of the role of a compiler.

Can SPASM-ng only be an assembler? I don't see any reason to not extend it.

It's open source. Fork it if you feel the need.

FWIW, in GCC4TI for the TI-68k series, both A68k and GNU as for m68k can optimize some instructions - and then, the environment-specific linker can optimize more when there's full knowledge of the program: range-cutting, etc..

The A68k (documentation: https://debrouxl.github.io/gcc4ti/a68k.html ) and linker (documentation: https://debrouxl.github.io/gcc4ti/ld.html ) optimizations are disabled by default and enabled through command-line switches. However, at least one GNU as optimization is enabled by default: automatically turning two special, non-portable mnemonics to short form, or providing a long form of two mnemonics which exist only in word form: https://debrouxl.github.io/gcc4ti/gnuasm.html#SEC221 .
It works best inside a single source code file, and I'd say that this is mostly a misfeature for lazy programmers, though theoretically, it helps the code remain as optimized as possible when reordering inside a file: for instance, automatically taking advantage of 2-byte branches which may appear, while keeping 2-byte branches as such, and automatically adjusting 2-byte branches to 4 bytes.

If someone were to implement the optimization feature you mentioned in spasm, I'd strongly suggest that it be controlled by a command-line switch which defaults to disabled, of course
I have a weak preference for a special mnemonics which would be turned into either jp or jr, over automatic optimization of standard mnemonics: while it makes the code non-portable to other assemblers, the fact is that spasm-ng is the community assembler of choice nowadays, and spasm-ng is itself a multi-platform program.