Design Principles分析和总结分析和总结.docxVIP

Design Principles or why flat assembler is different? The purpose of this article is to describe the main ideas that led the flat assembler project during the all time of its development. The initial design nominates the direction in which the program can evolve and limits somewhat the possible extensions to its capabilities. I wrote this text to explain how flat assembler has come to the point where it is and what were the reasons for the many desing decision I made. The Roots - Turbo Assembler versus Netwide Assembler When I have learned the assembly language, I was exclusively using the Borlands Turbo Assembler, but it was a commercial product and I didnt own a personal copy. Thats why I got interested in the new these days product, Netwide Assembler, which was free and even open source. But, though I did like some of its ideas, I was generally disappointed by the lack of many features I was used to while using TASM. So I gave it up and never even started using NASM for any of my projects. Instead I tried, with success, writing my own assembler (actually I wrote two, fasm being the latter one, but I will skip over describing the first one, as it had the same syntax and less features), with capabilities enough to assemble all my previosly written projects with only small source changes. It should be then obvious, that the syntax Ive chosen for fasm, was primarily imitating the one I was using when programming with TASM, and its important to note that TASM offered two modes, with different syntaxes, first and default being the MASM-compatiblity mode, and the second one called Ideal mode. After learning the basics of assembly language I have quickly switched to the Ideal mode, as I found it easier and less confusing. There are two main characteristics of the Ideal mode that I followed when designing the syntax for flat assembler. The first one is the syntax for accessing contents of memory. TASM with Ideal mode selected requires such operand to be always surrounded