15 Jul
2024
15 Jul
'24
8:09 p.m.
On Sun, Jul 14, 2024 at 9:44 PM Aron Insinga <aki(a)insinga.com> wrote:
I think that this may be (at least as far as any of us
know) a unique case
from the early days of computing where, on the TX-0 and a port to the
PDP-1, a macro body *is* stored as a list of 'machine words' instead of
source text. The macro body is not manipulated as a 'higher-level
construct', it is just used for quite limited macro expansion.
Thanks for clearing this up. I think you're right that this is a unique
case. All assemblers I've ever dealt with expanded macros into text that
was then fed to the assember's parser just as if it were ordinary source
program text. On a machine with limited memory it makes sense not to have
to re-parse the expanded source after macro expansion, but instead to do
the translation on the fly. It saves a second pass over the expanded macro
call.
-Paul W.