Question

I’m writing an assembler for a custom micro controller I’m working on. I’ve got the assembler to a point where it will assemble instructions down to binary.

However, I’m now having problems with getting labels to work. Currently, when my assembler encounters a new label, it stores the name of the label and the memory location its referring to. When an instruction references a label, the assembler looks up the label and replaces the label with the appropriate value.

This is fine and dandy, but what if the label is defined after the instruction referencing it? Because of this, I need to have my parser run over the code twice.

Here’s what I currently have for my main function:

303 int main(int argc, char* argv[])
304 {
305 
306     if(argc < 1 || strcmp(argv[1],"-h")==0 || 0==strcmp(argv[1],"--help"))
307     {
308         //printf("%s\n", usage);
309         return 1;
310     }
311     // redirect stdin to the file pointer
312     int stdin = dup(0);
313     close(0);
314 
315     // pass 1 on the file
316     int fp = open(argv[1], O_RDONLY, "r");
317     dup2(fp, 0);
318 
319     yyparse();
320 
321     lseek(fp, SEEK_SET, 0);
322 
323     // pass 2 on the file
324     if(secondPassNeeded)
325     {
326         fp = open(argv[1], O_RDONLY, "r");
327         dup2(fp, 0);
328         yyparse();
329     }
330     close(fp);
331 
332     // restore stdin
333     dup2(0, stdin);
334 
335     for(int i = 0; i < labels.size(); i++)
336     {
337         printf("Label: %s, Loc: %d\n", labels[i].name.c_str(), labels[i].memoryLoc);
338     }
339     return 0;
340 }

I’m using this inside a flex/bison configuration.

Answer 1

If that is all you need, you don’t need a full two-pass assembler. If the label is not defined when you reference it, you simply output a stand-in address (say 0x0000) and have a data structure that lists all of the places with forward references and what symbol they refered to. At the end of the file (or block if you have local symbols), you simply go through that list and patch the addresses.