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XTRAN Demonstration:  Analyze HP (Digital, Compaq) VAX MACRO Problem Operands

In translating VAX MACRO to C, a number of types of assembler operands can cause problems.  These include:

• Numeric offsets to registers
• Expression offsets to registers
• Expression addresses
• Program counter (.) references
• Names that are not declared, so XTRAN can't determine whether they are addresses or values

The following analysis identifies and reports all of the above problems.  It uses standard rule sets that we deliver with our VAX MACRO analysis version of XTRAN.  The analysis and reporting rules comprise about 600 noncomment lines of XTRAN's rules language, which we call "meta-code".

The procedure is to run the operand analysis on all source files, appending the results to a single text data file.  When all modules have been analyzed, a final XTRAN run is done with a set of reporting rules that reads the text data file and generates the analysis output.

The analysis output shows all occurrences of each instance of each of the problems specified above, in all analyzed source files.  (In the example below, we analyzed only one source file.)

XTRAN has the ability to handle numeric and expression offsets and expression addresses automatically, by generating appropriate address arithmetic in C.  However, the tradeoff is C code that is less readable and not as easily maintained.  So it is usually better to identify the problems and fix them than to let XTRAN translate them.  Once they have been identified by an analysis such as this one, and suitable fixes have been determined, XTRAN has facilities to automate the cleanup as part of the translation process.  Click here for an actual translation example using this technique.

The input to and output from XTRAN are untouched, except that line numbers have been added to the input for reference.

 Input to XTRAN:  deman4-a.mar

44 A	=	1
45 B	=	2
46 	MOVL	A+1(R2),2(R3)	;expr offset, num offset
47	MOVL	UNKN(R1),R2	;ambig opnd
48	MOVL	WS+2,R2		;expr addr
49 C	=	.		;parsed as "C:"
50	MOVL	A+1(R2),4(R3)	;expr offset, num offset
51	MOVL	WS+2,R2		;expr addr
52	MOVL	A+2(R2),2(R3)	;expr offset, num offset
53	MOVL	WS+2,R2		;expr addr
54	BRW	.+4		;PC occurrence
55	MOVL	A+1(R2),2(R3)	;expr offset, num offset
56	MOVL	WS+4,R2		;expr addr
57 .	=	1000		;PC occurrence
58	MOVL	#WS+4,R2	;expr addr
59	MOVL	UNKN(R1),R2	;ambig opnd
60 WS:	.BLKW	1

 Output from XTRAN:

Total of 2 numbers as offsets:

2 (3):
    deman4-a.mar . . . . . . .  46, 52, 55
4 (1):
    deman4-a.mar . . . . . . .  49

Total of 2 expressions as offsets:

A+1 (3):
    deman4-a.mar . . . . . . .  46, 49, 55
A+2 (1):
    deman4-a.mar . . . . . . .  52

Total of 2 expressions as addresses:

WS+2 (3):
    deman4-a.mar . . . . . . .  48, 51, 53
WS+4 (2):
    deman4-a.mar . . . . . . .  56, 58

Total of 1 ambiguous operand:

UNKN(R1) (2):
    deman4-a.mar . . . . . . .  47, 59

Program Counter references:

. (1):
    deman4-a.mar . . . . . . .  57

COPYRIGHT 2012; reproduction prohibited without permission.  Revised 2009-09-11

XTRAN is a trademark of Pennington Systems Incorporated, VAX and VAX MACRO of Hewlett-Packard.