I do a fair amount of assembly programming with x86 and 8051 family, and have experience in about 20 different major processor families. My *biggest* peeve is people who refuse to put the name and version of the tool chain used to build the product in the source file (not to mention whether they used NMAKE, DMAKE or TMAKE under DOS/Win32).

As you may or may not know, for any given processor, there are a number of different assemblers. *Generally* the processor instructions remain the same, but the pseudop-ops (for macros, page ejects, equates, etc) often differ. Someone sends you a source file, and you have no idea what tool was used to assemble it. Sometimes, when you have a lot of experience, you can recognize "Oh, it's MASM, or TASM, or OPTASM". Many times though, especially if it was someone who used one of the 50+ freeware assemblers, you'd have better luck rolling dice.

I'm guilty of not doing that for Perl code. Luckily, Perl is a lot more portable than assembly source code is. On the other hand, people can use 5.6-isms that someone who doesn't use 5.6 may not recognize.

I always list the tool chain for my Forth, ASM, and 'C'-ware. I think I shall start at least indicating what it was run under when I wrote it, for my Perl scripts.

--Chris

e-mail jcwren

In reply to (jcwren) Re: Danger, danger Will Robinson (documenting code) by jcwren
in thread Danger, danger Will Robinson (documenting code) by jepri

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