Re: forwarded message from H. J. Lu

["John David Anglin" <dave at hiauly1 dot hia dot nrc dot ca>]

> We no longer blindly remove whitespaces. Each backend which assumes
> whitespace removed may be affected. When it happens, we will add a
> testcase and fix it.

Studying this some more, I'm again not convinced we should modify
tc-hppa.c to allow spaces in operands.  It was written under the
assumption that there was no non-essential whitespace in the input.
I don't have a good feel for what was being removed before the above
change was implemented.

H. J's patch is far from complete in terms of processing whitespace
in operands.  I'm also not sure that it is wise to attempt to accept
a more liberal syntax.  Do we accept whitespace around "="?  Before
and after commas, etc?  There are some syntax ambiguities involving
spaces in expressions.  The precise details as to what the HP assembler
will accept are not documented but all examples in the manual don't have
any extra whitespace.  GCC doesn't add gratuitous whitespace and GAS
is primarily intended as an assembler for GCC.

On the otherhand, the above change has broken building GCC 3.2.x
and 3.3 on hppa-linux.  There might be other breakage.  I have fixed
the problem in milli64.S on the 3.3 branch and GCC trunk, but still
there will be complaints.

Dave
-- 
J. David Anglin                                  dave.anglin@nrc-cnrc.gc.ca
National Research Council of Canada              (613) 990-0752 (FAX: 952-6602)