Assembler does not support DB 'string'

[Missouga Dongi]

All 8085 assemblers I've seen support the DB 'string'
construction but not this one.
I've attached a patch to allow string declarations too.

There is a known minor bug: consecutive spaces inside
strings are compressed to just one space. To correct this I would have to break to much of the existing program structure and I'd rather not.

Appart from the above minor bug, strings enclosed in single or double quote are now allowed in DB and commas
inside strings are handled correctly.

[Missouga Dongi (zelea2)]

Logged In: YES
user_id=911054
Originator: YES

File Added: gnusim8085-1.3.2-db_string_ok.diff

[Aanjhan Ranganathan (aanjhan)]

Logged In: YES
user_id=798578
Originator: NO

Thanks for the patch. It would be great if you attach a sample test program that you used to verify your changes.

[The Escapist (wisd00m)]

This really is an important feature, I had to work around this some time ago and it can get pretty annoying fairly soon.

The minimal syntax typically supported is:

label: db 'f','o','o'
label: db "mystring",0A,0D,'$'

i.e. single quotes for single bytes, and double quotes for multiple bytes.

The built-in assembler is not especially good at handling those "pseudo instructions" (i.e. macros etc):
http://www.tortall.net/projects/yasm/manual/html/nasm-pseudop.html

      db 0x55 ; just the byte 0x55
      db 0x55,0x56,0x57 ; three bytes in succession
      db 'a',0x55 ; character constants are OK
      db 'hello',13,10,'$' ; so are string constants
      dw 0x1234 ; 0x34 0x12
      dw 'a' ; 0x61 0x00 (it's just a number)
      dw 'ab' ; 0x61 0x62 (character constant)
      dw 'abc' ; 0x61 0x62 0x63 0x00 (string)
      dd 0x12345678 ; 0x78 0x56 0x34 0x12
      dd 1.234567e20 ; floating-point constant
      dq 0x123456789abcdef0 ; eight byte constant
      dq 1.234567e20 ; double-precision float
      dt 1.234567e20 ; extended-precision float

source: http://www.nasm.us/doc/nasmdoc3.html

There are suggestions to replace the assembler with a more feature-complete solution: https://bugs.launchpad.net/gnusim8085/+bug/579336