Nasm preprocessor - again

[Peter Johnson]

On Fri, 15 Sep 2006, Mathieu Monnier wrote:
> That's why I began looking into the nasm preproc code. I thought searching 
> why the attached file wasn't working would be as good an introduction to that 
> code as any, but it proved me wrong. After looking a few seconds at it, I 
> felt an urgent need to rewrite it. Looking at it some more time, I was even 
> amazed it was working at all.

Very early on in Yasm's history we were in fact planning on implementing 
our own clone of NASM's preprocessor due to the same reasons you mention. 
Due to lack of time (and somewhat lack of true need), we didn't get very 
far and instead imported the "real" NASM preprocessor, as messy as it may 
be.

It may be worth resurrecting the beginnings of our attempt, called YAPP. 
It's bitrotted (I'm not quite sure how much), as it was removed from the 
tree in 2003 and had been disconnected from the build for a while before 
that.  It also has an extremely limited feature set, but it might be a 
place to start.  See 
http://www.tortall.net/projects/yasm/browser/trunk/yasm/modules/preprocs/yapp?rev=959

If there's interest in bringing it back, I can work on getting it into a 
compilable state (e.g. unbitrotting it) but I don't have a lot of time or 
interest in really developing it into a reasonable (e.g. fully featured) 
alternative to the NASM preprocessor.  (I've got plenty else to work on in 
Yasm.)

In the meantime, I will take a look at the bug you found and try to track 
it down myself.

-Peter