[Coco] Portal-9 info

[KnudsenMJ at aol.com]

In a message dated 12/15/03 2:50:31 AM Eastern Standard Time, 
rtaylor at bayou.com writes:

> I've been in touch with the author of HLA about my techniques for handling 
>  object-oriented programming in assembly, and much to my surprise, he 
>  totally agreed with several things I am doing from the assembler to help 
>  support this type of concept.

Roger, it's really good to see structures, and maybe even inheritable 
classes, done in assembly language.  I thought it was good when Visual BASIC added 
structures to BASIC a few years ago, but having these in assembly is really cool.

As for what someone said about doing all this in macros, he's right, but your 
specialized syntax makes it clear what is being done and why.  Macro calls 
all look alike,

Having said that, you would do well to build a really good macro preprocessor 
into your system, if not already.  Back in the '60s and '70s, mainframe 
assemblers had macro systems that could almost implement a high-level language.  
Many useful text processing jobs could be done just in the macro assembler, 
without ever executing the output!

I don't know that we need all that macro power today, but maybe something 
along the lines of the C preprocessor would be worthwhile.  --Mike K.