Re: gas-mode.el - Comments welcome

["Heike C. Zimmerer" <nospam07q1@gmx.net>]

Masatake YAMATO <jet@gyve.org> writes:

> Which architecture are you targeting on? i386?

It is not bound to a specific architecture (there are just too many of
them).  Checking of opcodes or even arguments is IMHO better done by
the assembler.  However, it would be no big deal to highlight specific
opcodes (the code is already there and used to recognize asm
directives) or even to check for the correct number of arguments (the
current parser returns the number of arguments).

I've postponed this idea, since I feel it wouldn't buy much for me.
Once you're accustomed to the instruction set (and I've seen a lot of
exotic ones), getting opcode and number of arguments correct is not
something that IMHO justifies another level of highlighting (I don't
think the more's the better when it comes to it).

I see that it might, however, be a coding aid for the occasional
programmer and for beginners, so if there's enough interest in it, it
can be done, preferably by reading the instruction set from some
external configuration file.

For now, we should stick with the present features and make sure they
work rock solid.

> gdb-ui.el could show disassembled code. If gas-mode can supports
> font-locking well on multiple architectures' assembly code, 
> gas-mode's font-locking code can be applied to gdb-ui.el.

That would be no big deal.  gas-mode can parse any standard assembler
line and return its syntactic fields, including positional
information.  Let's focus on that later.

- Heike