Home Original page

[Fwd: Re: [PATCH] MIPS32 DSP instructions again]

Eric Christopher echristo@redhat.com
Thu Jun 9 21:09:00 GMT 2005 
> I see where you're coming from.  But if your configuration was screwed
> up you would be quite likely to send the wrong flag to the assembler
> too :-(.
> 

Easier debugging a "why wasn't this accepted by the assembler" than "why
on earth did I get a sigill?

> Perhaps I'm from an old school, but I do really hate programs which
> could have given you some useful output, but second-guess you and give
> you an error message instead.  There are always corner cases where
> you're doing bizarre things (running DSP instructions on a non-DSP CPU
> and trap-emulating them, for example) which you end up having to
> figure out how to lie to the toolchain.  I think an assembler is a
> low-level thing which should do what it's told to do, and not argue
> overmuch. 
> 
> Are you convinced?  Half...?

Not really. This last case is why the switch.

Heck, if we wanted the assembler to just assemble instructions we'd just
get rid of all macro instructions while we were at it :)

-eric
More information about the Binutils mailing list