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Writting the Heritage/1 Assembler

5/31/2010

Started to write an Assembler for Heritage/1, called H1ASM v.0.

I had no plans for start building my development tools yet. Moreover I was aimed to purchase a commercial cross assembler or to seek an open source one in the Internet. However, I started to think on how could I write one that is very simple. Soon I realized that it may be not too hard if I content my self with writing something really, really simple.

I started by cutting the Linker at once, that is my assembler will act as a "stand-alone" guy capable of directly generate the executable code. This leads to serious limitations indeed but it also simplifies tremendously the assembler on its own.

Macros were also discarted as well as conditional compilation and other "advanced" features that real assembler ususally offer. My assembler will be so simple that I'm not longer scared by the task of writing it entirely from scratch.

I chosen PHP command-line interface (cli) because it is easier than C, as code doesn't need to be compiled. Moreover, being PHP a popular scripting language, my assembler will be able to run on Linux, Windows or Mac OS-X and even ported for a web environment with little effort.

I started building the code up the point that I have a comfortable infrastructure. But now I'm more concern with the production of the Programmer's Manual, which is actually my SPEC for guiding my self during the development cycle.

The (unfinished) Manual is already published in this site, here is the link: