Re: MASM documentation

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Thanks all. Some links were useful, some were not. There is no documentation for
anything important; a couple of the links were fictional works about what assemblers might
do someway, but using the constructs in a real program causes the assembler to crash
(Microsoft wants to legitimize the use of this word by guaranteeing that no one will ever
again be able to deduce what "crash" means, by hiding all useful information).

But it got me further than I had been before. Today's problem: how to use a struct
declaration when the pointer to the structure base is in a register.

The construct
mov eax, [ecx].StructureName.field

causes the assembler to "stop working", whatever that now means. (It probably means the
code has never been tested...syntax errors should not cause programs to take internal
failures that terminate their execution...)

Anyway, I'm off the net for a week, teaching in Columbia MD all next week.

(By the way, the documentation on STRUCT is, to put it mildly, totally useless, but at
least the documentation is largely self-consistent in that regard, being almost uniformly
totally useless)
joe

On Fri, 13 Nov 2009 12:03:27 -0500, Joseph M. Newcomer <newcomer@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Has anyone ever encountered the documentation for MASM. Not the useless garbage in the
MSDN, but real documentation. THe kind that gives the syntax of identifiers, for example,
or explains what options are available with the OPTIONS directive (not just a list of
them, but the actual explanations)? Or the syntax of a string, or of an initializer?

I'm reverse-engineering some of this as I am designing a course in x86 assembly code
(really! Turns out people need to *read* it), but I'd be happier if I found real
documentation somewhere.

The last time I wrote assembler it was for a device driver in MS-DOS, in 1989. But
apparently some things never go away, such as the need to know it, but nobody teaches it
any longer.
joe
Joseph M. Newcomer [MVP]
email: newcomer@xxxxxxxxxxxx
Web: http://www.flounder.com
MVP Tips: http://www.flounder.com/mvp_tips.htm
Joseph M. Newcomer [MVP]
email: newcomer@xxxxxxxxxxxx
Web: http://www.flounder.com
MVP Tips: http://www.flounder.com/mvp_tips.htm
.

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