To HLA or not to HLA

[BlackVortex]

What ? Integrated operating system functions don't count as impurities.  :naughty:

[brethren]

What ? Integrated operating system functions don't count as impurities.  :naughty:

whats your point? its an assembler with a library of procedures, whats 'impure' about that?

edit-
oh right. i see what your saying :wink i'm pretty sure daves comment about api calls wasn't mean't to be taken seriously :P

[Astro]

I tried to use HLA myself. The bright side is that the syntax is easier to read than the asm syntax. My problem was that I had to learn another syntax. I prefer to learn the syntax that's as close to the machine code as possible, simply because I'd like as few as possible layers between my code and the machine code.

Couldn't put it better!

It's why I moved to assembler on the x86. I was fed up with "How does C++ know that? How does C++ do that? WTF??" so I gave up after much trying and wasting time figuring out where everything came from. HANDLE, LPSTR etc.. just finished me off when I discovered they were all the same type - a DWORD. It was too much - what is wrong with using the actual type? Equates are about the only thing that made sense, but then what is wrong with using the actual value and a quick comment?

Best regards,
Robin.

[hutch--]

 :P

Robin,

Sounds like you have already been converted.  :U

[sinsi]

\masm32\examples\exampl10\slickhuh\slickhuh.asm

What's with using [ebp] and leave? RealASMers uses [esp] and count what's pushed.
Nothing better than seeing

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push eax
push [esp+16]
push [esp+16]
call WindowsAPI

[dedndave]

leave = good   :P
sometimes, you want to exit a routine from different points in the code
leave can save you a lot of balancing code
i don't always use it, but it seems to work well for more complex routines

[sinsi]

leave = ebp -> that thing like 'enter x,y' that was such a good idea.
Isn't leave a slow instruction?

x86 has a lack of registers, having ebp available is *A Good Thing*.
x64 has more and is more fun  :bg

ymmv,imho,ime,etc.

[dedndave]

enter is the slow one
leave is actually pretty fast (and small)
i don't use enter   :bg

in my ling long kai fang routines, i use EBP as a stack frame base pointer throughout most of the routine
but for the base conversion loop, i push/pop it and use it as a general register
during the loop, i don't need to access the stack frame

[jj2007]

i don't use enter   :bg

Me neither. I always use invoke, which results in

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push ebp
mov ebp, esp
add esp, nn
I wonder if old versions of Masm use enter...?

[brethren]

i don't use enter   :bg

Me neither. I always use invoke, which results in

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push ebp
mov ebp, esp
add esp, nn
I wonder if old versions of Masm use enter...?

in the prologue it should be sub esp,nn for reserving the space for local vars on the stack.

[jj2007]

in the prologue it should be sub esp,nn for reserving the space for local vars on the stack.

Masm uses add esp, -offset
JWasm uses sub esp, offset

The former saves some bytes if the required # of bytes is exactly 128

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include \masm32\include\masm32rt.inc

MyTest PROTO: DWORD, :DWORD

.code
AppName db "Masm32 is great!", 0
Hello db "A message:", 0

start:
invoke MyTest, offset AppName, addr Hello
exit

MyTest proc arg1:DWORD, arg2:DWORD
LOCAL locbuf[128]:BYTE
  MsgBox 0, arg1, arg2, MB_OK
  ret
MyTest endp

end start


Masm

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00401033       /$  55                       push ebp
00401034       |.  8BEC                     mov ebp, esp
00401036       |.  83C4 80                  add esp, -80

JWasm

Code Select Expand

00401033       /$  55                       push ebp
00401034       |.  8BEC                     mov ebp, esp
00401036       |.  81EC 80000000            sub esp, 80


[dedndave]

not very many procs have 32 dword parms (thank goodness)