Gasp. Am I getting old and stupid?

[Steven W. Orr]

On Saturday, Jul 8th 2006 at 22:08 -0400, quoth Paul Lussier:

=>"Bill Ricker" <bill.n1vux at gmail.com> writes:
=>
=>>> =>=>grok. GAS with GASP looks like a regular macro-assembler to me."
=>>> =>I guess it looks like it's all there.
=>>> Correction. It's not all there. I looked at the gasp info page from
=>>> somewhere online and literally all of it is missing. :-( The only thing we
=>>> get is include, vanilla macros, and simple conditionals.
=>>
=>> So if "we" (e.g., Steve's friend) want powerful macros (not just cpp),
=>> is there any option besides M4 in the Gcc/binutils Gnu toolchain ?
=>
=>Ahm would m4 be any use at all in assembler programming?  When Steve
=>or whomever mentioned they needed macros wrt assembler, I interpreted
=>that as nothing at all to do with m4.  I'm fairly familiar with m4 as
=>the macro language used to generate sendmail config files, and have
=>used it a little to generate things like aliases files, etc.  But
=>using it in relation to assembler programming is something which never
=>crossed my mind.  Probably because I haven't done any assembler in
=>about 15 years or more, and that for a college course :)

I found an old copy of binutils that comes with gasp. It still doesn't 
answer why gasp is gone.

As for m4, m4 could be used to write gasp but to start out with m4 would 
be a huge pain just as it would be to write something in assembler if you 
have a C compiler. ;-)