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Jan 1, 2000

HLA Standard Library Interface for FASM Users

Download HLA4FASM Zip File
HLA (High Level Assembler) users have always had the benefit of the HLA Standard library when writing assembly code under Windows and Linux. The HLA Standard Library provides hundreds of procedures, functions, and macros that help simplify the creation of complex assembly language code. In theory, any assembler that supports linking in library code is capable of calling HLA Standard Library routines, but without appropriate header files and example code demonstrating how to do this, calling HLA Standard Library routines from some other assembler hasn't been a trivial process. Until now.

The "HLA4FASM" package contains an include file ("hlalib.inc") and a special "skeleton" file that FASM users can use to create applications that call many of the procedures and functions in the HLA Standard Library. This package also includes a sample test program ("demo.asm") that demonstrates several calls to the stdlib functions that this package supports.

Although FASM's syntax doesn't provide as nice an interface to these functions as HLA, the availability of these routines will help make writing FASM code much easier than before. Another nice feature of these routines is that they allow readers of "Windows Programming in Assembly" to more easily convert the HLA examples in WPA to FASM.

Currently, the documentation is a weak point in this package. There is no "FASM-centric" documentation for each of the library routines (the PDF file accompanying this package describes each of the routines using HLA syntax). Read the existing HLA documentaton (included in this package) to figure out how the functions work, and then look at the sample program ("demo.asm") and the header file ("hlalib.inc") to see the syntax for the given standard library invocation. I'll try to get around to documenting this for FASM users as time allows (I welcome any help on this...)

Many thanks to "Odyssey" from the Win32ASM Community Messageboard for doing this translation for FASM.

HLA Stdlib Documentation