Portable "asm" (Was: The D Programming Language)

[Doug Gwyn]

In article <2738 at mmintl.UUCP> franka at mmintl.UUCP (Frank Adams) writes:
>Clearly, assembler statements should have been defined as:
>#asm <statement>
>instead of
>asm("statement");

A properly-designed system programming language should not have such
a feature at all.  (It is not guaranteed in C, either.)  The interface
between the optimized code produced for the HLL and the in-line
assembly code is quite problematic.  Also, the compiler should not be
forced to have an assembler built-in just to handle such stuff; many
compilers directly generate relocatable object code.

If there is some feature that might be worth having asm() for, for
example "rotate" instructions, then consider designing it into the
HLL.