hi,

i have been programming with an asm language called goasm for ages, but after reading some of the asm source posted on gso in masm i am having second thoughts...

in goasm to loop i have to use cmp and jz, whereas in masm you have macro language .WHILE, .IF etc.

to me, this macro language looks more like c than asm, and i wonder which is a more efficient asm language.

so my question is whether there are disadvantages to masm's macro language, or whether i am wasting my time in goasm doing it so low level?

thanks.

Well i don't know one word ASM but i didn't knew there were diffrent kinds

Im thinking I would like to learn ASM so this is a good question cause I'd like to learn the one that will help me most in the future, learning new languages.

you can test it easily, but most of the time you won't waste much using the macros from masm32 .

take a look here:



disassembled code:


as you can see it doesn't really matter much, but the big advantage of the macro assembler is that you can do both, if you want to code normal assembly for full control on a particular part of the program you can, and if you don't need it for another then you can use macros where useful...


btw, the code above is assembled with masm32 v8.2 (latest release) via:
ml /c /coff test.asm
link /subsystem:windows test.obj

i have used others as well, but now i only use tasm once in a while for 16-bit coding, the rest i use masm32 .

also using :

invoke ExitProcess,0

is a lot easier then :

push 0
call ExitProcess

both can be used, and if you use invoke it will do exactly the same in the result of the code....


this is just my opinion, do with it what you like

masm gives you more time for pussy and beer
low level asm makes your gf leave you and a beer gut


i mean its all part of preference ... thats why people choose higher languages like vb .. you can do the shit quick and easy and any 8 yr old with visual studio can push out a prog.

i like masm because its quick and easier to read and still small and sexy, plus its easier to transfer msdn code over

by far, nasm (and maybe yasm in some times ^^)

what about tasm? I heard it is pretty good,too. I didn't use TASM so much, but i had a version of MASM with an editor which had some stupidities, but contained great tutorials of Iczelion, that can be good for beginners to learn ASM...
But programming with machine language would be better if we had an automatic PE generator, where you don't have to include anything but external DLLs which aren't in windows... Then you only had to write your code, and it would be more flexible than any other compiler+linker...