nasm/Changes

Change log for NASM
===================

0.90 released October 1996
--------------------------

First release version. First support for object file output. Other
changes from previous version (0.3x) too numerous to document.

0.91 released November 1996
---------------------------

Loads of bug fixes.
Support for RDF added.
Support for DBG debugging format added.
Support for 32-bit extensions to Microsoft OBJ format added.
Revised for Borland C: some variable names changed, makefile added.
LCC support revised to actually work.
JMP/CALL NEAR/FAR notation added.
`a16', `o16', `a32' and `o32' prefixes added.
Range checking on short jumps implemented.
MMX instruction support added.
Negative floating point constant support added.
Memory handling improved to bypass 64K barrier under DOS.
$ prefix to force treatment of reserved words as identifiers added.
Default-size mechanism for object formats added.
Compile-time configurability added.
`#', `@', `~' and `?' are now valid characters in labels.
`-e' and `-k' options in NDISASM added.

0.92 released January 1997
--------------------------

The FDIVP/FDIVRP and FSUBP/FSUBRP pairs had been inverted: this was
fixed. This also affected the LCC driver.

Fixed a bug regarding 32-bit effective addresses of the form
[other_register+ESP].

Documentary changes, notably documentation of the fact that Borland
Win32 compilers use `obj' rather than `win32' object format.

Fixed the COMENT record in OBJ files, which was formatted
incorrectly.

Fixed a bug causing segfaults in large RDF files.

OBJ format now strips initial periods from segment and group
definitions, in order to avoid complications with the local label
syntax.

Fixed a bug in disassembling far calls and jumps in NDISASM.

Added support for user-defined sections in COFF and ELF files.

Compiled the DOS binaries with a sensible amount of stack, to
prevent stack overflows on any arithmetic expression containing
parentheses.

Fixed a bug in handling of files that do not terminate in a newline.

0.93 released January 1997
--------------------------

This release went out in a great hurry after semi-crippling bugs
were found in 0.92.

Really _did_ fix the stack overflows this time. *blush*

Had problems with EA instruction sizes changing between passes, when
an offset contained a forward reference and so 4 bytes were
allocated for the offset in pass one; by pass two the symbol had
been defined and happened to be a small absolute value, so only 1
byte got allocated, causing instruction size mismatch between passes
and hence incorrect address calculations. Fixed.

Stupid bug in the revised ELF section generation fixed (associated
string-table section for .symtab was hard-coded as 7, even when this
didn't fit with the real section table). Was causing `ld' to
seg-fault under Linux.

Included a new Borland C makefile, Makefile.bc2, donated by Fox
Cutter <lmb@comtch.iea.com>.

0.94 released April 1997
------------------------

Major item: added the macro processor.

Added undocumented instructions SMI, IBTS, XBTS and LOADALL286. Also
reorganised CMPXCHG instruction into early-486 and Pentium forms.
Thanks to Thobias Jones for the information.

Fixed two more stupid bugs in ELF, which were causing `ld' to
continue to seg-fault in a lot of non-trivial cases.

Fixed a seg-fault in the label manager.

Stopped FBLD and FBSTP from _requiring_ the TWORD keyword, which is
the only option for BCD loads/stores in any case.

Ensured FLDCW, FSTCW and FSTSW can cope with the WORD keyword, if
anyone bothers to provide it. Previously they complained unless no
keyword at all was present.

Some forms of FDIV/FDIVR and FSUB/FSUBR were still inverted: a
vestige of a bug that I thought had been fixed in 0.92. This was
fixed, hopefully for good this time...

Another minor phase error (insofar as a phase error can _ever_ be
minor) fixed, this one occurring in code of the form
   rol ax,forward_reference
   forward_reference equ 1

The number supplied to TIMES is now sanity-checked for positivity,
and also may be greater than 64K (which previously didn't work on
16-bit systems).

Added Watcom C makefiles, and misc/pmw.bat, donated by Dominik Behr.

Added the INCBIN pseudo-opcode.

Due to the advent of the preprocessor, the [INCLUDE] and [INC]
directives have become obsolete. They are still supported in this
version, with a warning, but won't be in the next.

Fixed a bug in OBJ format, which caused incorrect object records to
be output when absolute labels were made global.

Updates to RDOFF subdirectory, and changes to outrdf.c.

0.95 released July 1997
-----------------------

Fixed yet another ELF bug. This one manifested if the user relied on
the default segment, and attempted to define global symbols without
first explicitly declaring the target segment.

Added makefiles (for NASM and the RDF tools) to build Win32 console
apps under Symantec C++. Donated by Mark Junker.

Added `macros.bas' and `insns.bas', QBasic versions of the Perl
scripts that convert `standard.mac' to `macros.c' and convert
`insns.dat' to `insnsa.c' and `insnsd.c'. Also thanks to Mark
Junker.

Changed the diassembled forms of the conditional instructions so
that JB is now emitted as JC, and other similar changes. Suggested
list by Ulrich Doewich.

Added `@' to the list of valid characters to begin an identifier
with.

Documentary changes, notably the addition of the `Common Problems'
section in nasm.doc.

Fixed a bug relating to 32-bit PC-relative fixups in OBJ.

Fixed a bug in perm_copy() in labels.c which was causing exceptions
in cleanup_labels() on some systems.

Positivity sanity check in TIMES argument changed from a warning to
an error following a further complaint.

Changed the acceptable limits on byte and word operands to allow
things like `~10111001b' to work.

Fixed a major problem in the preprocessor which caused seg-faults if
macro definitions contained blank lines or comment-only lines.

Fixed inadequate error checking on the commas separating the
arguments to `db', `dw' etc.

Fixed a crippling bug in the handling of macros with operand counts
defined with a `+' modifier.

Fixed a bug whereby object file formats which stored the input file
name in the output file (such as OBJ and COFF) weren't doing so
correctly when the output file name was specified on the command
line.

Removed [INC] and [INCLUDE] support for good, since they were
obsolete anyway.

Fixed a bug in OBJ which caused all fixups to be output in 16-bit
(old-format) FIXUPP records, rather than putting the 32-bit ones in
FIXUPP32 (new-format) records.

Added, tentatively, OS/2 object file support (as a minor variant on
OBJ).

Updates to Fox Cutter's Borland C makefile, Makefile.bc2.

Removed a spurious second fclose() on the output file.

Added the `-s' command line option to redirect all messages which
would go to stderr (errors, help text) to stdout instead.

Added the `-w' command line option to selectively suppress some
classes of assembly warning messages.

Added the `-p' pre-include and `-d' pre-define command-line options.

Added an include file search path: the `-i' command line option.

Fixed a silly little preprocessor bug whereby starting a line with a
`%!' environment-variable reference caused an `unknown directive'
error.

Added the long-awaited listing file support: the `-l' command line
option.

Fixed a problem with OBJ format whereby, in the absence of any
explicit segment definition, non-global symbols declared in the
implicit default segment generated spurious EXTDEF records in the
output.

Added the NASM environment variable.

From this version forward, Win32 console-mode binaries will be
included in the DOS distribution in addition to the 16-bit binaries.
Added Makefile.vc for this purpose.

Added `return 0;' to test/objlink.c to prevent compiler warnings.

Added the __NASM_MAJOR__ and __NASM_MINOR__ standard defines.

Added an alternative memory-reference syntax in which prefixing an
operand with `&' is equivalent to enclosing it in square brackets,
at the request of Fox Cutter.

Errors in pass two now cause the program to return a non-zero error
code, which they didn't before.

Fixed the single-line macro cycle detection, which didn't work at
all on macros with no parameters (caused an infinite loop). Also
changed the behaviour of single-line macro cycle detection to work
like cpp, so that macros like `extrn' as given in the documentation
can be implemented.

Fixed the implementation of WRT, which was too restrictive in that
you couldn't do `mov ax,[di+abc wrt dgroup]' because (di+abc) wasn't
a relocatable reference.