Further Brass development

Friday, 28th April 2006

One of my ongoing projects is Brass, a Z80 assembler.

The newest release adds all sort of goodness, especially nested modules - for example:

.nestmodules
.local
.module Animals

    .module Cat
        Legs = 4
    .endmodule

    .echo "Humans have ", Human.Legs, " legs.\n"

    .module Human
        Legs = 2
        .module Brother
            Age = 17
            .echo "My sister is ", Animals.Human.Sister.Age, " years old.\n"
        .endmodule
        .module Sister
            Age = 21
            .global
                Arms = 2
            .endglobal
        .endmodule
    .endmodule

    .module Spider
        Legs = 8
        .echo "A spider has ", Legs, " legs.\n"
    .endmodule

.endmodule

.echo "Cats have ", Animals.Cat.Legs, " legs.\n"
.echo "My brother is ", Animals.Human.Brother.Age, " years old.\n"
.echo "My sister has ", Arms, " arms (global!)\n"

It also now allows for unsquished binaries (where each byte is expanded to two ASCII characters - the hexadecimal representation of the byte. This is used in native TI-83 programs).

I'm trying to unify (to some extent) 82, 83 and 83+ programming (as the hardware is fairly standard between them) - hopefully, fairly carefully written source code should be able to be assembled to 82, 83 and 83+ binaries for a variety of shells with a single keypress from Latenite. TI haven't made this easy with large inconsistency between system call names and variable names...