MASM 6.1 vs 6.11

[Fred Cisin]

On Wed, 18 Jan 2006, Chuck Guzis wrote:
> There were actually two IBM PC assemblers 1.0  that were sold as a bundle;
> ASM, which IIRC, would run in 64K on a system with one diskette drive,
> didn't have error messages (just numbers) and MASM, which was probably the
> slowest assembler (per unit of processor speed) that I've ever seen.
> Horribly buggy too--you'd think that an assembler would at least generate
> the right code.  Phase errors and the dreaded "Internal Error" were all too
> common.  The manual notes for "Internal Error":

Phase errors were usually caused by forward references,
MOV VAR2, 0
. . .
VAR2 DB ?
and would then generate the message for EVERY label from there to the end.
Avoiding forward references, or overiding the datat type would prevent
them
MOV BYTE PTR VAR2, 0

> MASM 4.0 was like a breath of fresh air.  Reasonably fast and not too
> buggy.

... and 5.0 was the first one with tolerable documentation provided.