Suite8080

This version extends the assembler to accept uppercase identifiers for instruction mnemonics, labels, and constants. The change allowed reformatting the Assembly demos to take advantage of such a style and uppercase the constants.

The `ds` and `org` directives may now have identifiers as operands, possibly in uppercase, which must be defined before use.

Finally, the documentation is available as a [separate website](https://suite8080.readthedocs.io).

Welcome to version 0.4.0 of Suite8080.


New features

There are two main new features in this release.

The first is the ability of `asm80` to save the assembled program’s symbol table in the `.sym` CP/M file format. The other feature enhances the assembler to accept the double-quote character `”` as a string delimiter, which means strings and character constants may be written as `”This is a string”` and `”F”`.

The output of the assembler's help message (`-h` option) and verbose mode (`-v`) is now slightly more descriptive and complete.


Documentation and demos

This release comes with a [new document describing the usage of the Suite8080 tools](https://github.com/pamoroso/suite8080/blob/master/docs/usage.md) and expands the [design document](https://github.com/pamoroso/suite8080/blob/master/docs/design.md) by covering the assembler’s parser. Some minor updates to the `README.md` file list only the currently available Suite8080 tools and add links to the source tree directories it references.

In addition, I changed the [`memcpy.asm`](https://github.com/pamoroso/suite8080/blob/master/asm/memcpy.asm) and [`upcase.asm`](https://github.com/pamoroso/suite8080/blob/master/asm/upcase.asm) Assembly demos to make them run on CP/M. However, they produce no visible output and, to inspect how they change the machine state, you need to run the programs inside a debugger such as SID or DDT.


Bug fixes and other changes

The work on this release involved also some refactoring of `asm80` to remove redundant declarations of global variables, move the code that saves the assembled program out of `main()` into its own function, and tweak the code that processes the default output file name.

Finally, I fixed a bug that made the assembler ignore the `-o` option when building the output file name and `-` was supplied as the input file.

The assembler has these new command line options:

- `-`: read input from standard input
- `-o`: output file name
- `-v`: verbose output

Reading from standard input makes it possible to use the Unix program `m4` as an Assembly macro processor, as demonstrated by the new sample files `ldabcmac.m4` and `ldabc.m4` in the `asm` directory.

The assembler has the following new features:

- `db` accepts multiple arguments
- character constants such as `'C'` or `'*'` can be immediate operands of Assembly instructions, as well as arguments of the `db` and `equ` directives
- `db` accepts also labels as arguments

In addition, to prevent confusion with zero, octal numbers now end in `Q` or `q` instead of `O` or `o`.

This alpha-quality early relase is incomplete and includes only the assembler and disassembler. But it can be installed from PyPI, which makes it easy to download and try Suite8080.