Manual for current MASM

Post by Bonita Montero
Is there any manual for the current MASM-syntax ML64 14.x supplied
with Visual Studio 2019 (16.x) implements? Or an alternative manual?

Sorry, found it myself:
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/cpp/assembler/masm/microsoft-macro-assembler-reference?view=vs-2019
But the documentation is not so well as the other Visual Stuido doc.

Melzzzzz

2020-04-01 18:55:23 UTC

Post by Bonita Montero
Is there any manual for the current MASM-syntax ML64 14.x supplied
with Visual Studio 2019 (16.x) implements? Or an alternative manual?

You have plenty of assemblers nowadays which are better then masm.
I use nasm and fasm.

--
press any key to continue or any other to quit...
U ničemu ja ne uživam kao u svom statusu INVALIDA -- Zli Zec
Svi smo svedoci - oko 3 godine intenzivne propagande je dovoljno da jedan narod poludi -- Zli Zec
Na divljem zapadu i nije bilo tako puno nasilja, upravo zato jer su svi
bili naoruzani. -- Mladen Gogala

Bonita Montero

2020-04-02 06:09:16 UTC

Post by Melzzzzz

Post by Bonita Montero
Is there any manual for the current MASM-syntax ML64 14.x supplied
with Visual Studio 2019 (16.x) implements? Or an alternative manual?

You have plenty of assemblers nowadays which are better then masm.
I use nasm and fasm.

What's besser than MASM ?

Frank Kotler

2020-04-02 20:57:25 UTC

Post by Melzzzzz

Post by Bonita Montero
Is there any manual for the current MASM-syntax ML64 14.x supplied
with Visual Studio 2019 (16.x) implements? Or an alternative manual?

You have plenty of assemblers nowadays which are better then masm.
I use nasm and fasm.

What's besser than MASM ?

;) :) :)

As moderator, I really should point out that "My assembler is better
than your assembler" is really not on topic here... (differences are okay)

Best,
Frank

wolfgang kern

2020-04-03 09:35:21 UTC

Post by Frank Kotler

Post by Melzzzzz

Post by Bonita Montero
Is there any manual for the current MASM-syntax ML64 14.x supplied
with Visual Studio 2019 (16.x) implements? Or an alternative manual?

You have plenty of assemblers nowadays which are better then masm.
I use nasm and fasm.

What's besser than MASM ?

;) :) :)
As moderator, I really should point out that "My assembler is better
than your assembler" is really not on topic here... (differences are okay)
Best,
Frank

OTOH, isn't it a bit quite in here yet ?
at least the discussion is about "assembler" :)
__
wolfgang

Robert Riebisch

2020-04-03 16:47:43 UTC

Post by wolfgang kern
OTOH, isn't it a bit quite in here yet ?

You probably mean "quiet". ;-)

Post by wolfgang kern
at least the discussion is about "assembler" :)

I just wanted to say something. *g*

--
Robert Riebisch

Ned Latham

2020-04-03 05:19:16 UTC

Post by Melzzzzz
You have plenty of assemblers nowadays which are better then masm.
I use nasm and fasm.

What's besser than MASM ?

:) :) :)
As moderator, I really should point out that "My assembler is better
than your assembler" is really not on topic here... (differences are okay)

Or comments on quality?

Back in 1994 a year 2 assigment was to write an automaton in assembler.
They gave us three weeks and MASM, EDIT (or was it EDLIN?) and some M$
system calls to work with. The editor and the asembler were pathetic.

I mean they were both *really* bad. And the system calls were slo-o-o-w.

So after nine days of struggling with those grossly inadequate tools
I spat the dummy. Got onto usenet looking for some help. Found PC-Write
and a86. Also did a bit of checking on the IBM PC BIOS.

Rewrote the assigment using those tools and info. Finished ahead of
time and got 110/100 for it.

What's better than MASM? a86. Streets ahead.

Terje Mathisen

2020-04-04 16:44:15 UTC

Post by Melzzzzz
You have plenty of assemblers nowadays which are better then masm.
I use nasm and fasm.

What's besser than MASM ?

:) :) :)
As moderator, I really should point out that "My assembler is better
than your assembler" is really not on topic here... (differences are okay)

Or comments on quality?
Back in 1994 a year 2 assigment was to write an automaton in assembler.
They gave us three weeks and MASM, EDIT (or was it EDLIN?) and some M$
system calls to work with. The editor and the asembler were pathetic.
I mean they were both *really* bad. And the system calls were slo-o-o-w.
So after nine days of struggling with those grossly inadequate tools
I spat the dummy. Got onto usenet looking for some help. Found PC-Write
and a86. Also did a bit of checking on the IBM PC BIOS.
Rewrote the assigment using those tools and info. Finished ahead of
time and got 110/100 for it.
What's better than MASM? a86. Streets ahead.

My personal favorite was tasm, the assmbler shipped alongside Borland's
Turbo languages.

It could run in masm-compatible modus, then they added a few
nice-to-have extensions.

Terje

Terje

--
- <Terje.Mathisen at tmsw.no>
"almost all programming can be viewed as an exercise in caching"

Ned Latham

2020-04-05 08:42:18 UTC

Post by Terje Mathisen

Post by Melzzzzz
You have plenty of assemblers nowadays which are better then masm.
I use nasm and fasm.

What's besser than MASM ?

:) :) :)
As moderator, I really should point out that "My assembler is better
than your assembler" is really not on topic here... (differences are okay)

Or comments on quality?
Back in 1994 a year 2 assigment was to write an automaton in assembler.
They gave us three weeks and MASM, EDIT (or was it EDLIN?) and some M$
system calls to work with. The editor and the asembler were pathetic.
I mean they were both *really* bad. And the system calls were slo-o-o-w.
So after nine days of struggling with those grossly inadequate tools
I spat the dummy. Got onto usenet looking for some help. Found PC-Write
and a86. Also did a bit of checking on the IBM PC BIOS.
Rewrote the assigment using those tools and info. Finished ahead of
time and got 110/100 for it.
What's better than MASM? a86. Streets ahead.

My personal favorite was tasm, the assmbler shipped alongside Borland's
Turbo languages.

Mmm. Borland were good. I had Turbo Pascal on my CP/M machine.

I'm a bit confused about a86 now; ISTR the author as a <somebody> Brown:
now it's an Erik Isaakson.

Post by Terje Mathisen
It could run in masm-compatible modus, then they added a few
nice-to-have extensions.

I had all that stuff on my Archimedes, which had a really good 80186
emulator. But I threw all my old stuff out a couple of years ago.

That was a monumental blunder.

r***@nospicedham.gmail.com

2020-04-05 14:56:58 UTC

I've never had any issues with MASM. The
high-level flow control abilities greatly
simplify common loops and branches.

MASM uses Intel syntax, which I find 12,000:1
preferable over AT&T.

I wrote a kernel, debugger, disassembler,
and Hercules MDA driver in MASM 6.11d with
16-bit and 32-bit segments, totaling about
100 KB.

Boot sectors, real-mode port of pmode kernel
debugger. Not one issue or shortcoming in
MASM in my experience.

I liked TASM, and have used NASM to validate
my own assembler because I wrote it in Linux.

Still prefer MASM. Used it since 1.0.

--
Rick C. Hodgin

R.Wieser

2020-04-05 16:35:24 UTC

Ned,

Post by Terje Mathisen
My personal favorite was tasm, the assmbler shipped alongside Borland's
Turbo languages.

Mmm. Borland were good. I had Turbo Pascal on my CP/M machine.

Don't be too sure of that.

I still have-and-use Tasm32 v5.x , and over time have found a number of bugs
in it. Some that did not seem to have any adverse effects, one which made
it forget the remainder of the line, some which caused garbage to be
generated, and others that just crashed either the assembler or linker. It
also cannot load a register with a constant float or define wide strings
("db" for ASCII, nothing for wide strings).

IOW, its "good enough" (as long as you stay aware of its quirks), but
certainly not "good".

Regards,
Rudy Wieser

Ned Latham

2020-04-05 17:15:45 UTC

Post by R.Wieser
Ned,

Post by Terje Mathisen
My personal favorite was tasm, the assmbler shipped alongside
Borland's Turbo languages.

Mmm. Borland were good. I had Turbo Pascal on my CP/M machine.

Don't be too sure of that.
I still have-and-use Tasm32 v5.x , and over time have found a number
of bugs in it. Some that did not seem to have any adverse effects,
one which made it forget the remainder of the line, some which caused
garbage to be generated, and others that just crashed either the
assembler or linker. It also cannot load a register with a constant
float or define wide strings ("db" for ASCII, nothing for wide strings).
IOW, its "good enough" (as long as you stay aware of its quirks), but
certainly not "good".

Well, my experience of Borland *is* limited to Turbo Pascal for CP/M.
There was no assembler with it. (But CP/M had some pretty good ones.)

As far as x86 assemblers go, I've only ever used MASM and a86.
MASM bad, a86 good; so good that I never looked beyond it.

Kerr-Mudd,John

2020-04-05 17:49:44 UTC

On Sun, 05 Apr 2020 17:15:45 GMT, Ned Latham

Post by R.Wieser
Ned,

Post by Terje Mathisen
My personal favorite was tasm, the assmbler shipped alongside
Borland's Turbo languages.

Mmm. Borland were good. I had Turbo Pascal on my CP/M machine.

Don't be too sure of that.
I still have-and-use Tasm32 v5.x , and over time have found a number
of bugs in it. Some that did not seem to have any adverse effects,
one which made it forget the remainder of the line, some which caused
garbage to be generated, and others that just crashed either the
assembler or linker. It also cannot load a register with a constant
float or define wide strings ("db" for ASCII, nothing for wide strings).
IOW, its "good enough" (as long as you stay aware of its quirks), but
certainly not "good".

Well, my experience of Borland *is* limited to Turbo Pascal for CP/M.
There was no assembler with it. (But CP/M had some pretty good ones.)
As far as x86 assemblers go, I've only ever used MASM and a86.
MASM bad, a86 good; so good that I never looked beyond it.

I never got into a86's quirks compared to masm back when I was learning
x86; but going from masm to nasm just seemed nice, as nasm is less
verbose hovever I dislike that one has to translate code from masm to
nasm; especially if there are lots of addr[ix] --> [addr+ix] and changing
dR 0 dup n to resR n (and then nasm complains that it's not initialised!)

--
Bah, and indeed, Humbug.

Ned Latham

2020-04-05 18:12:14 UTC

Post by Kerr-Mudd,John

Post by R.Wieser
Ned,

Post by Terje Mathisen
My personal favorite was tasm, the assmbler shipped alongside
Borland's Turbo languages.

Mmm. Borland were good. I had Turbo Pascal on my CP/M machine.

Don't be too sure of that.
I still have-and-use Tasm32 v5.x , and over time have found a number
of bugs in it. Some that did not seem to have any adverse effects,
one which made it forget the remainder of the line, some which caused
garbage to be generated, and others that just crashed either the
assembler or linker. It also cannot load a register with a constant
float or define wide strings ("db" for ASCII, nothing for wide strings).
IOW, its "good enough" (as long as you stay aware of its quirks), but
certainly not "good".

Well, my experience of Borland *is* limited to Turbo Pascal for CP/M.
There was no assembler with it. (But CP/M had some pretty good ones.)
As far as x86 assemblers go, I've only ever used MASM and a86.
MASM bad, a86 good; so good that I never looked beyond it.

I never got into a86's quirks compared to masm back when I was learning
x86;

Looking at what I wrote above, I think I need to add that it refers only
to programming under MSDOS.

Post by Kerr-Mudd,John
but going from masm to nasm just seemed nice, as nasm is less
verbose hovever I dislike that one has to translate code from masm to
nasm; especially if there are lots of addr[ix] --> [addr+ix] and changing
dR 0 dup n to resR n (and then nasm complains that it's not initialised!)

LOL

Sorry, I just had to laugh. Reminded me of the godawful error messages
that some systems produce.

r***@nospicedham.gmail.com

2020-04-05 19:48:37 UTC

Post by Ned Latham
LOL
Sorry, I just had to laugh. Reminded me of the godawful error messages
that some systems produce.

My favorite all-time error message was when an unexpected character was
inserted in source code by accident, such as an accidental K being typed
by mistake:

Spurious 'k' found on row 23, column 1

:-) I think it was either MASM 6.x, or Microsoft's C Compiler 6.x. Can't
remember. I still often think of that error message to this day when a
new compiler reports a different error for the same thing.

--
Rick C. Hodgin

Ned Latham

2020-04-06 02:35:11 UTC

Post by r***@nospicedham.gmail.com

Post by Ned Latham
LOL
Sorry, I just had to laugh. Reminded me of the godawful error messages
that some systems produce.

My favorite all-time error message was when an unexpected character was
inserted in source code by accident, such as an accidental K being typed
Spurious 'k' found on row 23, column 1
:-) I think it was either MASM 6.x, or Microsoft's C Compiler 6.x. Can't
remember. I still often think of that error message to this day when a
new compiler reports a different error for the same thing.

Ah. Will the good ole days ever be gone?

George Neuner

2020-04-04 11:49:07 UTC