Why did the original code for FIND.COM use lop as a label instead of loop? | Hacker News Reader

Why did the original code for FIND.COM use lop as a label instead of loop?

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22 pointscremno6 comments

But wouldn't the colon at the end disambiguate? It seems like the colon is mandatory for labels and forbidden for opcodes.

(My comment, which got flagged as spam. Is spam-flagging common on that blog, or is it just random?)

I enjoyed the linked post[1] at the bottom more than the post itself.

    #define while(x) if(x)

Too bad April 1 is already gone, I'm kind of tempted to try and sneak that in.

[1] http://www.cs.earlham.edu/~skylar/humor/Unix/c.language.pran...

Then why is it `lop:` instead of `lop`?

Doesn't the colon mean label?

The post says the colon is optional. Seems like a poorly thought-out syntax.

Okay, so maybe "lop:ret" and "lop ret" can be parsed the same (agree about the poorly thought-out syntax), but I don't see why "loop:ret" needs to be parsed as "loop ret" unless the colon is actually whitespace in masm.

The ':' is optional when followed by a directive.

"Loop" is also a valid label on at least say MASM 5.0, just need to use /w0 to suppress the warning.

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