Re: bug_as

[Nick Clifton]

Hi Albert,

> The documentation of the GNU assembler as 2.9.5

  (Although not particularly relevent to this discussion, version
  2.9.5 is quite old.  You may find it a good idea to upgrade to a
  more recent version, eg 2.11.2).

> has the following significant defect: 
> 
> It doesn't document what output format it generates.

That is because it does not know.  By default the documentation is
generic, not targeted at one particular architecture, thus it cannot
say what output format will be produced.

> I do not think that this is "installation dependent" is an excuse. 
> At least the documentation (info as) should contain a clue about how 
> this information can be obtained.

What, like looking at the name of the assembler executable ?  (eg
arm-elf-as) or by running "objdump -p" on an object file or linked
program ?

> Do not tell me that it is not important, as long you can link.
> I am one of the few persons doing extensive assembly programming 
> on Linux, building an implementation of Forth.  In particular: an
> assembler that generates a.out only cannot be used to implement
> Forth.  This means that currently I use nasm that generates coff
> output.

So if you are not using GAS, why do you care ?  And if you want to use
GAS, why do you need its documentation to specify the particular output
format of the version you are using ?

Cheers
        Nick