ASM86.TXT               A Jerry Boutelle type ASM86     by Tom Zimmer

To would be users of ASM86,                             Date: 04/23/94

The accompanying file ASM86.SEQ is an F-PC source file that implements an
assembler for the 8086 using a table style of assembler designed and
implemented by Jerry Boutelle.  It was subsequently enhanced by myself,
and is provided as an example of an assembler for a very complex
instruction set.  It is in fact not completely error free, since I was not
ever able to get it to work with TCOM properly. The other reason I never
 bothered to integrate it into F-PC permenantly is that it is just too
large.  The compiled code for the assembler itself was significantly
larger than than PASM.  And the performance during assembly was not
significantly faster, though it is very fast. The primary benifit of this
style of assembler is that it is relatively easy to implement a new one
for a new processor.  So it is well suited to use with TCOM, where new
assemblers need to implemented often and quickly. And in the TCOM
compiler, the extra size doesn't normally matter since most of the
processors so far have had much simpler syntaxes than the 8086. So, look
at this assembler as the experiment it is, and learn from it. It is very
fast, because it uses an assembly language scanner to match legal operand

combinations, and as such also has fairly good error handling as well.


                                        Tom Zimmer