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Date:      Tue, 20 Oct 1998 09:28:52 -0600
From:      Brett Glass <brett@lariat.org>
To:        Marius Bendiksen <Marius.Bendiksen@scancall.no>, David Holland <dholland@cs.toronto.edu>
Cc:        hackers@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: Producing non-GPLed tools for FreeBSD
Message-ID:  <4.1.19981020091349.06ac29d0@mail.lariat.org>
In-Reply-To: <3.0.5.32.19981020162222.0091a640@mail.scancall.no>
References:  <4.1.19981019150118.06775920@mail.lariat.org> <98Oct19.164437edt.37814-9002@qew.cs.toronto.edu> <4.1.19981019000937.06571220@mail.lariat.org>

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At 04:22 PM 10/20/98 +0200, Marius Bendiksen wrote:
 
>Have you considered switching to a non-AT&T-syntax compiler, such as NASM?
>As I recall, NASM does not suffer from GPL...

The NASM license is essentially the GPL. To quote from the docs:

  Basically, NASM is free. You can't charge for it. You can copy it as
  much as you like. You can incorporate it, or bits of it, into other
  free programs if you want. (But we want to know about it if you do,
  and we want to be mentioned in the credits.) We may well allow you
  to incorporate it into commercial software too, but we'll probably
  demand some money for it, and we'll certainly demand to be given
  credit. And in extreme cases (although I can't immediately think of
  a reason we might actually want to do this) we may refuse to let you
  do it at all.

>I'm pretty fluent at 'normal' syntax assembly, though I'm a bit rusty with
>p+ instructions and the coprocessor. I have no real experience in parsers,
>though..

Parsing assembly language is pretty easy. The trickiest part of the "normal"
syntax is that the validity (or non-validity) and semantics of a statement 
may depend on context. For instance, "assume" directives can change the
semantics of statements that follow them. The assembler has to be worried
about segmentation, and must search for the segment register through
which it can "reach" a symbol. It gets tricky. That's why Borland invented
its "ideal" Intel assembly language syntax.

--Brett


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