I need to start on the assembler soon so this is a good time to summarize the assembly syntax and rules.
Plain-Assembly is an assembly language on the same level as a 3rd generation language. It is called an assembler because we maintain one statement one instruction. I deliberately avoid the word compiler because there will be a higher level Plain language later. I will write the basic proposal for assembly language and it will also be updated on the documentation pages. I also intend to write a few pdf docs, but lets mature the concept first.
Getting started
use system module mymodule println ("Hello World") end
The example above is the classic hello world. What happen here is that we access a standard module “system” that enable the core C firmware. What “system” we use is defined in an XML file we call “repository” – basically a small database which in this case define that we have a module “System” that is in the C firmware. Other modules we use will also need to be defined in the repository.
Plain is module oriented, so all code must be within a module statement. In this case we access system.println to output “Hello World” to the standard console. The console is whatever we have defined in the C firmware, usually the serial port on our SWD connector.
pa -r repository -a mymodule
This is the proposed command line for the assembler. -r add a repository, -a add a plain assembly file. Input is “mymodule.pln” and output is “mymodule.rtl”.
The RTL file uses a xml format describing the binary content we will download to the device. I need a xml format so I can read and inspect the content of the RTL, but the plain downloader will convert this into binary easyIPC commands that are sent to the device.
We have in reality decided what device we assemble for my selecting the repository file. The assembler will include this as verification statements in the RTL, so any attempt to download this to a different device will fail.
pd mymodule <device>
This is the proposed command line for the download utility.