ALP Programming Guide and Reference/Installation

Installation

The following components are part of the ALP package:

ALP

The assembler itself. These are the basic files that must be installed before the assembler can be used.

MASM2ALP

The MASM 5.10 Command Line Driver. The ALP component must be installed before the MASM2ALP utility can be utilized.

Installing ALP

ALP consists of two files:

alp.exe
alp.msg

You can rename the root portions of the two file names if desired. In most cases, it does not matter whether the file names are in upper- or lowercase because the default OS/2 file systems disregard case. It is possible, however, that the use of an OS/2 Installable File System (IFS) might require that file names be referenced exactly as they are named with respect to upper- and lowercase. If this is true, then the root portion of the alp.exe and alp.msg file names (see BaseEXE) must be spelled identically and the .msg extension on the messages file name must be specified in lowercase or the assembler will not be able to find the messages file at run time.

To install ALP on OS/2:

1. Copy alp.exe into a directory of your choice. If the assembler will be invoked from the command line (rather than by absolute reference from a makefile or command file), then the selected directory should be among those referenced by the PATH environment variable.
2. For best performance, the alp.msg file should be copied into the same directory used in step 1 or in a directory referenced by the <BaseEXE>_PATH environment variable. It is not necessary to set any additional environment variables if the first method is used.
   
   Alternatively, a directory referenced by the DPATH environment variable may also be used, but performance may be degraded during initialization, since the assembler must search all of the listed directories for the alp.msg file. See The ALP Messages File for more information.
3. Optionally, default values for command line options may be established. See <BaseEXE>_OPTIONS for more information.

Installing MASM2ALP

The MASM2ALP utility consists of a single file:

masm2alp.exe

To install MASM2ALP on OS/2:

1. Copy masmalp.exe into a directory of your choice. If the utility will be invoked from the command line (rather than by absolute reference from a makefile or command file), then the selected directory should be among those referenced by the PATH environment variable.

   It is recommended that both masm2alp.exe and alp.exe be installed in the same directory, especially in build environments where reliance on environment variables is discouraged. If masm2alp.exe is invoked by absolute path name (rather than via a PATH search), it will use that same path when it first attempts to execute alp.exe. This technique allows execution of alp.exe without requiring it to be referenced in the PATH. If the search fails, the path name prefix will be removed and MASM2ALP will rely on the operating system to locate alp.exe.

2. If you also use the Microsoft Macro Assembler, you must decide if MASM2ALP will replace MASM or co-exist with it. This usually means renaming the MASM executable (masm.exe) to something else, then renaming masm2alp.exe to masm.exe. Alternatively, you may choose to leave the names unchanged, taking manual steps in your makefiles or build scripts to insure that the correct executables are referenced from your build environment.
3. Optionally, default values for command line options may be established by defining the MASM environment variable. MASM2ALP interprets the contents of this environment variable before processing the command line. Any values set in this manner are translated and passed to alp.exe via the command line. The <BaseEXE>_OPTIONS environment variable used by alp.exe is not queried or modified by MASM2ALP.
4. If it becomes necessary to analyze a problem with MASM2ALP (such as failure to invoke alp.exe, or other unexpected behavior), defining the ALP_ECHO environment variable to any non-empty value will cause MASM2ALP to echo the generated command line to the standard output device.