[TUHS] Design of the AT&T assembly syntax

Robert Clausecker fuz at fuz.su
Tue Oct 29 06:14:08 AEST 2019


Some time ago, I wrote a piece [1] about the design of the AT&T
assembler syntax.  While I'm still not quite sure if everything in there
is correct, this explanation seemed plausible to me; the PDP-11
assembler being adapted for the 8086, then the 80386 and then ELF
targets, giving us today's convoluted syntax.

The one thing in this chain I have never found is an AT&T style
assembler for x86 before ELF was introduced.  Supposedly, it would get
away without % as a register prefix, thus being much less obnoxious to
use.  Any idea if such an assembler ever existed and if yes where?
I suppose Xenix might have shipped something like that.

The only AT&T syntax assemblers I know today are those from Solaris,
the GNU project, the LLVM project, and possibly whatever macOS ships.
Are there (or where there) any other x86 AT&T assemblers?  Who was
the first party to introduce this?

Yours,
Robert Clausecker

[1]: https://stackoverflow.com/a/42250270/417501

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