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>Chapter 1. Introduction</H1
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>The LW tool chain provides utilities for building binaries for MC6809 and
HD6309 CPUs. The tool chain includes a cross-assembler and a cross-linker
which support several styles of output.</P
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>1.1. History</A
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>For a long time, I have had an interest in creating an operating system for
the Coco3. I finally started working on that project around the beginning of
2006. I had a number of assemblers I could choose from. Eventually, I settled
on one and started tinkering. After a while, I realized that assembler was not
going to be sufficient due to lack of macros and issues with forward references.
Then I tried another which handled forward references correctly but still did
not support macros. I looked around at other assemblers and they all lacked
one feature or another that I really wanted for creating my operating system.</P
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>The solution seemed clear at that point. I am a fair programmer so I figured
I could write an assembler that would do everything I wanted an assembler to
do. Thus the LWASM probject was born. After more than two years of on and off
work, version 1.0 of LWASM was released in October of 2008.</P
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>As the aforementioned operating system project progressed further, it became
clear that while assembling the whole project through a single file was doable,
it was not practical. When I found myself playing some fancy games with macros
in a bid to simulate sections, I realized I needed a means of assembling
source files separately and linking them later. This spawned a major development
effort to add an object file support to LWASM. It also spawned the LWLINK
project to provide a means to actually link the files.</P
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author	William Astle <lost@l-w.ca>
date	Sat, 11 Aug 2012 15:18:58 -0600
parents	83b7b4ce3bbd
children