13 Jul
2024
13 Jul
'24
8:25 p.m.
On Sat, Jul 13, 2024 at 5:57 AM Ralph Corderoy <ralph(a)inputplus.co.uk> wrote:
John and Paul wrote:
Oh, no wonder the translator worked so well.
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 non-VAX compilers for Macro-32 do expansion. That is, they don't
just recognize macros and treat them as intrinsics or primitives that
are specially optimized. Macro is not C, where you can treat "library"
functions defined in the standard specially. John Reagan, of VSI, has
posted about XMACRO (the Macro compiler for x86) in various places.
For instance, here:
https://comp.os.vms.narkive.com/F05qmMaD/x86-cross-tools-kit#post4
This post, and others, suggests to me that XMACRO is definitely doing
macro expansion before compilation proper.
- Dan C.
> The VAX MACRO compiler takes in VAX assembly
source code, not
> binary VAX instructions.
Does anyone know how extensively they used the macro facilities?
You can write much higher level stuff as macros than as single
instructions, which makes it a lot easier to do efficient
translation.
Macros were used very extensively in VAX MACRO, both for user
programming and in the operating system. All of the low-level
system calls for user programs were implemented and documented as
macros. The OS assembly code made heavy use of macros as well.