QBASIC the return of the ancestor of all basics

[jj2007]

https://ethanwiner.com/fullmoon.html

PKUNZIP program needed to unzip the above files (29k)

[TouEnMasm]

this tool,inspired by MASM?

Yes,in his beautifull time,it was possible to add masm obj to speed it up a little.

[Vortex]

Hello,

The Qb64 package looks complicated. Not even sure how to make only an object module with Qb64. I think FreeBASIC is better organized.

[hutch--]

Magnus,

I think you will find that Atari had nothing to do with MASM of the same era. They were different hardware and did not use the same instruction set.

[jj2007]

I think you will find that Atari had nothing to do with MASM of the same era. They were different hardware and did not use the same instruction set.

Indeed, that site cares for the Atari 800. Several years later the Atari ST came out, and I started programming in 68000 Assembly, again a very different animal. It doesn't resemble at all the x86 set. For example, it had conditional calls, i.e. you could decide to call or not call a subroutine, based on flags.

[daydreamer]

I think you will find that Atari had nothing to do with MASM of the same era. They were different hardware and did not use the same instruction set.

Indeed, that site cares for the Atari 800. Several years later the Atari ST came out, and I started programming in 68000 Assembly, again a very different animal. It doesn't resemble at all the x86 set. For example, it had conditional calls, i.e. you could decide to call or not call a subroutine, based on flags.

I meant just the macro assembler
Maybe macro caps was inspired by masm
Macros are great tool whatever cpu,lacking opcodes and/or mnemonics
Shorter typing of often used code snippets

[hutch--]

There were assemblers before Microsoft created their first MASM.EXE. MASM originally was the name of the Unisys Meta ASseMbler.

[TimoVJL]

Before that
https://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/univac/manuals/pdf/Software/UP-8453_MASM_Programmers_Ref_1977.pdf

MASM was written in Pascal by Marc McDonald (Microsoft employee #1, after Bill & Paul). Microsoft had been doing all their development on DEC computers, and the macro capability put in MASM was modeled after DEC assemblers. Because MASM was such a large macro assembler, one of the guys referred to it as "McDonald's big mac".

[jj2007]

Interesting that an assembler had to be written in a high level language

[hutch--]

Timo,

Same assembler.

SPERRY UNIVAC
Meta-Assembler
(MASM)

[TimoVJL]

@hutch, my bad

Interesting that an assembler had to be written in a high level language

Those language/macro parsers was written in pascal at those times.
My first contact to computers had pascal and basic, not a personal computer, a bigger one
Data General Nova
The whole life i worked for industrial automation, programming was just a tool for that.

[jj2007]

Those language/macro parsers was written in pascal at those times.

The interesting bit is that Pascal probably did not directly generate machine code. So there must have been already an assembler for Pascal

[TimoVJL]

Sure, some people programmed pascal with assembler to target CPUs.

[daydreamer]

Sure, some people programmed pascal with assembler to target CPUs.

I made a very simply onepass assembler in BASIC
but it was without labels,variable names,mnemonics+followed only with numbers
ok I had kinda "line numbers" too,but line numbers was the actual adress I wanted the mnemonic be coded into

I dont know if pascal had some syscall or USR like basic,if not probably wrote directly to a executable file format?
pascal I remember was lot of typing full words ,that C later replaced with lot shorter {} and lot of other onechar symbols
masm shortened it down to PROC, ENDP