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Re: Changing GAS for ARM to accept semicolon as a comment character ?
- From: Richard Earnshaw <rearnsha at arm dot com>
- To: Nick Clifton <nickc at cambridge dot redhat dot com>
- Cc: binutils at sources dot redhat dot com, linux-arm at lists dot arm dot linux dot org dot uk, Richard dot Earnshaw at arm dot com
- Date: Fri, 12 Apr 2002 12:05:41 +0100
- Subject: Re: Changing GAS for ARM to accept semicolon as a comment character ?
- Organization: ARM Ltd.
- Reply-to: Richard dot Earnshaw at arm dot com
> Hi Guys,
>
> GAS for the ARM currently supports ';' as a line separator character
> and '@' as a line comment character. Would anyone object to my
> changing this so that ';' was also a line comment character and
> dropping the support for multiple instructions on a single line ?
> (Or else choosing a different character for a line separator).
>
> The reason is for compatibility with ARM's assembler which uses ';'
> as the comment character. (It would be nice to drop '@' as a
> comment character since this is used in ELF .section directives, but
> I suspect that there is far too much ARM assembly code out there for
> this to be feasible).
>
> Cheers
> Nick
>
This would silently break any file that relied on it. In particular, I
believe ';' is the only supported statement separator, so I think removing
it would make #define macros in assembly files that need to generate more
than one statement impossible.
It would certainly break NetBSD's support code.
R