Re: PATCH: Fix sign-extension of bignums

[Stan Shebs <shebs at apple dot com>]

Ian Lance Taylor wrote:

> The assembler has had irritating issues like this for a long time,
> because the assembler has no notion of the proper size for arithmetic
> operations (or, for that matter, the proper signedness).  Basically,
> we assume that everything is a simple signed integer, unless it
> obviously isn't.  And the size of the simple integer depends upon how
> the assembler is configured (your test case would probably work
> correctly if you configured with --enable-64-bit-bfd).  This approach
> works 99% of the time, but fails for specific cases like yours.
I tangled with this recently for 64-bit Darwin, finally gave up trying
to make it work for bignums and went the lame-o way of keying off the
target architecture.

Another five or so pissedoffnesses, I'll quit my job to rewrite gas;
the status quo is totally irritating, but it's easier to continuously
dribble out money for fixes than to whack at the root of the problem.

Stan