ASM Community

For some easier is just not 1337 enough :rolleyes: , oustside of the local variable problem and the BSS array of structures bug there is little to complain about in MASM so people complain about it being too good :)

You'll *really* like HLA :-)

As many others have said, as long as the assembler lets you code the way *you* want to, why should you care about the extra features it supports?

The truth is, all those "macros" found in Iczelion's tutorials are largely responsible for the resurgence in interest in assembly language. Maybe *you* like to see all those pushes before each call, but most people don't. The Iczelion tutorials were among the first pieces of decent example code that demonstrated the fact that you didn't have to use "1960's software engineering" when writing assembly code. This has forever changed the way people view assembly language.
Cheers,
Randy Hyde

well i would rather code it this way rather than using
cmp al,9h jae shit
and then breaking my head where it would jump and
how do i code the .elseif looking every change in debugger
and i know no c or no asm its just common thinking

convertproc:
mov esi,offset realans
mov edi,offset convans
mov ecx,8
tillend:
mov al,byte ptr
shr al,4
.if(al>9h)
call shit
.elseif
add al,30h
.endif
mov byte ptr ds:,al
add edi,1
mov al,byte ptr
and al,0fh
.if(al>9h)
call shit
.elseif
add al,30h
.endif
mov byte ptr ds:,al
add edi,1
dec ecx
inc esi
loopd tillend
retn

shit:
add al,7h
add al,30h
mov byte ptr ds:,al
retn

retn

Sinclair ZX Spectrum and Amstrad CPC series used all the Z80 CPU. I remember,in early 90's,the only assembler for Amstrad was developed by a company named Hisoft.

I think what has been missed with the original topic is that operating systems like Windows are primarily writen in C syntax so to write Windows code in assembler, you need to be able to handle C style syntax in a flexible and transparent way.

MASM long ago made the point that it can emulate C style programming and that has been its great strength that has resurrected assembler from the terrible code styles that used to be around to modern 21st century style code.

I have the next service pack for MASM32 in beta at the moment and it has substantially extended the library macro combination to improve code throughput so that assembler programmers can shift from hacking through crap like Windows API code and concentrate on algorithm design and useful productive code.

    Case WM_NOTIFY

    ; ---------------------------------------------------

    ; The toolbar has the TBSTYLE_TOOLTIPS style enabled

    ; so that a WM_NOTIFY message is sent when the mouse

    ; is over the toolbar buttons.

    ; ---------------------------------------------------

      mov eax, lParam

      mov ecx, [eax+4]    ; get the idFrom member

      mov eax, [eax]      ; get the hwndFrom member



      Switch eax

        Case hToolTips

          Switch ecx

            Case 50

              fn SendMessage,hStatus,SB_SETTEXT,0,"Clear Editor"

            Case 51

              fn SendMessage,hStatus,SB_SETTEXT,0,"Open Binary File"

            Case 52

              fn SendMessage,hStatus,SB_SETTEXT,0,"Save Assembler DB file"

            Case 53

              fn SendMessage,hStatus,SB_SETTEXT,0,"Copy To Clipboard"

            Case 54

              fn SendMessage,hStatus,SB_SETTEXT,0,"Exit program"

          Endsw

      Endsw

This capacity is NOW, a switch case emulation macro by Greg Falen and a new macro in MASM32 that extends quoted text support to all API and other function calls. There are of course a lot more.

If this was "black box" style coding using DLLs, there would be good reason to be suspicious of it but it has the full source code available and the macros that make it faster and easier to use so it is pure assembler written in MASM that is fully accessible to the programmer who uses it.

The difference is a modern assembler is powerful enough to do this form of emulation and it is clear enough for programmers to extend and write their own libraries and macros so they can construct a pseudo high level language of their own in pure assembler.

Regards,
http://www.asmcommunity.net/board/cryptmail.php?tauntspiders=in.your.face@nomail.for.you&id=2f46ed9f24413347f14439b64bdc03fd

NaN,

The fn macro loops through the parameters in any invoke call and when it find quoted text, it replaces it with an address in the initialised data section that contains the text.

It is actually calling a macro called "reparg" that does this on any parameter. There is also a choice of "testarg" to ensure that a quoted text is not put in the wrong place but this is not implimented in the "fn" macro.

Regards,
http://www.asmcommunity.net/board/cryptmail.php?tauntspiders=in.your.face@nomail.for.you&id=2f46ed9f24413347f14439b64bdc03fd

The thing is that there are very few high level constructs in MASM. Macros like the one Hutch displayed are not part of the language. It is analogous with creating a procedure in C that saves a bitmap called _SaveBitmap and then saying that C includes that function. It does not, but it is possible to do it in C and you can put it into a library and use it as if it were. For myself I do not use macros at all, I find that they tend to blur the language and for the most part you can usually do better when dealing with things on a per case basis. The nice thing about MASM is that it allows for both eventualities.