Re: A patch for linux 2.1.127

[mrs at wrs dot com (Mike Stump)]

> From: alan@lxorguk.ukuu.org.uk (Alan Cox)
> Date: Wed, 11 Nov 1998 12:02:41 +0000 (GMT)

> of course it does - movb, movw, movl, and furthermore because it
> follows a cross platform standard I can read non x86 stuff
> easily. It took me about 3 days to get the hang of gnu assembler
> while writing the original linux/smp boot code

Let me expound on this some.  I think we should go farther, and try
and set a standard for all assembly languages, and use various subsets
of it for most of the instructions on all machines.  Doing
dissassemblers and assemblers is then just a matter of knowing which
subset it is, and doing a compiler port, well, that's still hard, but
atleast one part of it is easier.

But, this isn't the real reason to do this, the real one, is to reduce
the burden on humans that have to read/write the stuff.  Some of the
assembly languages I have seen come out of gcc are truly done to
merely create job security (because they are so bad).