[Tinycc-devel] [C67] c67_asm()

[Peter \"Firefly\" Lund]

was the idea to use c67_asm() as the basis for doing inline assembly and
for handling stand-alone assembly?

tcc uses a neat trick, in that all identifiers or keywords relevant to any
part of the compiler or assembler is defined as a token.

The file tcctok.h is included a couple of times (so is i386-asm.h) and
contains some macro invocations with the strings for the
keywords/identifiers and their desired symbolic name (really an int)
inside tcc.

The way they get included defines a huge enum + a very long string
consisting of the keywords' names with a '\0' NUL character in between.
One of the startup functions split this string into separate keywords and
define them in the first-level symbol table together with their enums.

There is a first-level symbol table that handles the translation from a
string to a token number (and vice versa) and a second-level symbol table
that contains the actual current definition of the symbols in each of the
namespaces that C has (including the preprocessor namespaces for the
macros).  Each token entry in the first level symbol-table contains a
pointer to the current second-level symbol entry for each of the name
spaces.

(these pointers get updated as new symbols get defined -- or undefined, in
the case of macros -- and when nested scopes end)

This means that the rest of the compiler/assembler doesn't have to care
about the textual values of those tokens (except for the lexer).

The i386 assembler uses that to great advantage... for example, it can use
switch() for the mnemonics.  The mnemonics are also ordered in such a way
that their relative position in a group of similar mnemonics "just
happens" to give the right bit patterns for their opcodes.  A similar
thing is done with the order in which the registers are defined.

-Peter

"Of course, I'm not unbiased, but in my humble opinion, I've
 gotten close to something that I can be really proud of."
 -- Knuth on The Art of Computer Programming.