Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!mcvax!botter!star.cs.vu.nl!ast From: ast@cs.vu.nl (Andy Tanenbaum) Newsgroups: comp.os.minix Subject: Re: asld question Message-ID: <835@ast.cs.vu.nl> Date: 4 Jul 88 14:53:03 GMT References: <6263@bcsaic.UUCP> Reply-To: ast@cs.vu.nl (Andy Tanenbaum) Organization: VU Informatica, Amsterdam Lines: 18 In article <6263@bcsaic.UUCP> paula@bcsaic.UUCP (Paul Allen) writes: >I'm trying to build a kernel that has Eric Roskos' generic BIOS disk >driver in it. Part of that process is to convert his MASM version of >klib88.asm back into something that asld can grok. I'm having trouble >figuring out when to use '*' and when to use '#' in front of tokens. In theory, * means 1 byte and # means two bytes. This is PC-IX syntax. Of course, the assembler can see very well how big the number is and doesn't need the user to tell it whether it fits in 8 bits or not. Thus it ignores the difference between * and # ands uses 1 byte when the number fits in one byte, and two bytes otherwise. I don't know why PC-IX has two ways to express constants when the assembler can obviously figure it out itself except to mention that unlike Xenix, PC-IX is a genuine, official, IBM product, sold in genuine, official IBM stores (back when they had such things). -- Andy Tanenbaum (ast@cs.vu.nl)