Dealing with high-bit-set chars

[0cjs]

The particular disassembly project I'm working on right now involves a program that sets the high bit of a character to indicate the end of a string. This is currently a little awkward in the disassembly because it produces stuff like FCB $C4 as the last byte of the string, which isn't very readable.

To see if this could be improved, I tried out the following little patch. (It's not ready for production use—at the very least it's missing the RB_VARIANT version of the code—but I wanted to start a discussion about this first before putting too much work into this.)

diff --git a/f9dasm.c b/f9dasm.c
index e876e9b..343c74c 100644
--- a/f9dasm.c
+++ b/f9dasm.c
@@ -1896,7 +1896,10 @@ if ((nDigits == 2) &&                   /* if 2-digit value                  */
     sprintf(s, "'%c", W);
 #endif
   else
-    sprintf(s, "$%02x", W);
+    if (isprint(W & 0x7f))
+      sprintf(s, "'%c'|$80", W & 0x7f);
+    else
+      sprintf(s, "$%02x", W);
   }
 else if (IS_BINARY(addr))               /* if a binary                       */
   {

This offers two different solutions to the problem: it can either still produce a separate FCB line with just a more readable version of that char:

FCC     "MY STRIN"
FCB     'G'|$80

or you can annotate the whole range as char which works very well for a list of short strings if you use lcomment annotations to split the lines at the appropriate spots:

FCB     'F,'O,'R'|$80            ;015F: 46 4F D2       'FO.'   FOR
FCB     'N,'E,'X,'T'|$80         ;0162: 4E 45 58 D4    'NEX.'  NEXT
FCB     'D,'A,'T,'A'|$80         ;0166: 44 41 54 C1    'DAT.'  DATA

This little hack has been working well for me, but there may be more that could be done. It would be nice to be able to have the disassembler emit FCC syntax for these:

FCC     "MY STRIN",'G'|$80,"ANOTHER STRIN",'G'|$80

but I don't know if that's actually valid for most assemblers out there. It also might or might not make sense to make this optional, adding something like a hichar annotation to set the type of bytes to determine whether or not bytes are treated this way. Or maybe just an option to turn this on and off for the full disassembly or certain areas of the disassembly would be enough.

But getting much more sophisticated than the patch above would also be a fair amount of work, which I'm feeling would probably be more than I want to do given the current state of the code, lack of a testing framework, the concomitant difficulty of refactoring, etc.

What do you guys think?

[buchty]

On Thu, 25 Jul 2019, Curt J. Sampson wrote: This little hack has been working well for me, but there may be more that could be done. It would be nice to be able to have the disassembler emit `FCC` syntax for these: FCC "MY STRIN",'G'|$80,"ANOTHER STRIN",'G'|$80 but I don't know if that's actually valid for most assemblers out there.

Alfred Arnold's AS supports it (as just confirmed by him) -- and that's all *I* care about :) Rainer

[0cjs]

...It would be nice to be able to have the disassembler emit ...FCC "MY STRIN",'G'|$80,"ANOTHER STRIN",'G'|$80...

Alfred Arnold's AS supports it (as just confirmed by him) -- and that's all I care about :) Rainer

Well, I'd be pleased to have it, but I don't think that there's any code to do even the basic version of this (e.g., FCC "HELLO",$0D,$0A,"WORLD",$0D,$0A,$00) right now, is there?