On 11/16/06, Peter P. <plpeter2006@yahoo.com> wrote:
> William Couture <bcouture <at> gmail.com> writes:
>
> >
> > On 11/15/06, Peter P. <plpeter2006 <at> yahoo.com> wrote:
> > >
> > > There was a discussion in the past where the idea of porting assembly to C >
> > > for
> > > portability came up. Now there is a commercial solution for this. I did not
> > > try
> > > it but someone may need it:
> > >
> > >   http://www.microapl.co.uk/asm2c/
> > >
> > > It does not support the PIC (yet - and probably never will), only M68k and
> > i386+.
> >
> > And, unfortunately, there is no "freebie" sample program.
> >
> > I'd love to see what it does with some of my old .ASM programs,
> > but I'm not going to pay $Hundreds to find out...
>
> You do not say in what language. In theory 'porting to c' can be done by
> 'simply' (famous last words) #definig C macros based on each assembly
> instruction. When a mnemonic does not unambiguously describe the operation then
> some more work is needed (f.ex. by expanding menmonics to other mnemonics that
> correspond to unique functions). For better translation groups of instructions
> must be matched to constructs. Exactly like a loophole optimizer does. A
> reasonable translator can be built in Perl or Awk probably.

Er... I'm not sure what you mean by "in what language".  The original poster
talked about an Assembly to C translator, and I talked about my .ASM
(Assembly) programs.

As for using #define macros, that isn't even close.  For a trivial .ASM program:

      org   100h
      assume cs:code,ds:code,ss:code,es:code
entry:
      mov  ah,9
      mov  dx,offset message
      int    21h
      mov  ax,4c00h
      int    21h
message:
      db    "Hello, World!",0dh,0ah,24h
end

would become the C program:
   #include <stdio.h>
   main()
       {
       puts("Hello, World!");
       exit(0);   /* optional */
       }

> On a more interesting CPU (like the Z80 which has about 10 addressing modes)
> decoding the menmonics could become interesting (LD can stand for a variety of
> operations).

The x86 equivalent is MOV, and it has enough variations to keep you busy for
quite a while...

Bill

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