Well, that was a lot harder than I expected. The start_line_hook function in the assembler got a major overhaul just to deal with TI comments. But at least we can now properly assemble code again.

I had to implement a grammatical parser to recognize each part of an assembly line in order to see if a given chunk of text was a comment or not. This was needed because a comment starting with an asterisk may be incorrectly merged into an expression ("ai r1, 2 * comment"). The same kind problem may be seen if a comment follows an instruction using a postincrement argument ("a r1, *r2+ comment") since the intervening space was getting removed and we saw invalid expression errors.

I also had to remove all trailing whitespace caused by the comments because the gas file parser assumes that by the time start_line_hook is called, all comments and extra whitespace has already been removed. The file parser apparently can only handle whitespaces one character long.

Ugh. At least the assembler is working again. Now I can get back to the DWARF debugging stuff, using div_signed.c for testing.

OK, Looking better. I can compile using the "-g" option to include debugging information, and then use "tms9900-objdump -S" to disassemble and view the source code. Nice.

The problem is that the standard way of viewing mixed source and assembly output is to use "tms9900-gcc -Wa,-adhln -g". If I try this right now, I just see the assembly with no interleaved C code. Hmm.

After a lot of poking around, I got mixed assembly output working, but there are a lot of ".file" and ".loc" directives all over the place to deal with, which a stricter TI assembler will choke on. I want to only emit those when the "-g" option is invoked. Otherwise only straight TI code should be emitted.