13 Jul
2024
13 Jul
'24
5:09 p.m.
Well, doesn't it depend on whether VAX MACRO kept
the macros as
high-level entities when translating them, or if it processed macros in
the familiar way into instructions that sat at the same level as
hand-written ‘assembler’. I don't think this thread has made that clear
so far.
The Multics case that I cited was definitely in the latter category.
There was no "translator". Effectively there were just two different
macro packages applied to the same source file.
In more detail, there were very similar assemblers for the original
IBM machines and the new GE machines. Since they didn't have
"include" facilities, there were actually two source files that differed
only in their macro definitions. The act of translation was to supply
the latter set of definitions--a notably larger set than the former
(which may well have been empty).
Doug