William "Chops" Westfield <westfw <at> mac.com> writes:

> (I suppose if something like this is IMPLEMENTED in m4, that would be
> fine.  I just didn't find m4 particularly nice on its own the one time
> I used it...)

There is probably two of *everything* implemented in m4, but I agree about m4
being a little off flavor for 2007. And I always considered it byzantine.
Together with sendmail configuration files and termcap and printcap files.

Searching the web for assembly+preprocessor yielded a few hits:

  http://savannah.nongnu.org/project/memberlist.php?group=masp
  http://www.myri.com/scs/L3/doc/gasp_3.html

and then, there is Olin L.'s PREPIC (sp?)

Anyway I think that you expect a preprocessor that works in cpp style but can 
cope with the mysterious storage classes implied (!) by certain assembly
language constructs. I don't think that there is such a thing. But I think that
it could be duplicated by using C style storage classes in the first place and
writing the source such that the cpp generates actual assembly. Another 
approach would be to perform an extra pass with a loophole optimizer style tool
on generated assembly (extracted from a listing) and reassemble it. That tool
would be in a position to fix-up most things in the manner you have specified. 
I am sure that you know more about cpp than many, still it is instructive to
take a look at what gcc cpp can do today just to have an idea of the size of 
the tool you are looking for:

  http://developer.apple.com/documentation/DeveloperTools/gcc-4.0.1/cpp

So, I don't think that there is an easy small and free tool out there that can
do what you need. It looks like a full time job imho.

Anyway it is common knowledge that all C flow control structures can be 
emulated in pure cpp (with very few exceptions). F.ex. you iterated over the
length of a string when the sizeof() operator would have been useful in your
example.

I think that there is more than one way to do what you need and that pushing 
the preprocessor to do things the assembly way is not the way I would look at. 
I would prefer to keep everything on the 'input' side in C flavor and translate
to assembly as late as possible.

Peter P.


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