Is the world coming to an end?

[Adam D. Ruppe]

Ulrik Mikaelsson wrote:
> If you're looking for uncommonly used language-features that could
> easily be otherwise solved, go ahead and remove asm instead. I'll
> guess it's about as uncommon as octal literals (or maybe even more),
> have simple other solution (just compile it separately and link),
> and has much greater impact on the language and the compiler.

Actually, inline asm can't be replaced. If you link it separately,
it won't be inlined...

There's also a huge difficulty change. 010 -> octal!10 is a simple
change. It'd be enormous effort to de-inline assembly, even if
it were actually possible in the first place! Consider asm
in version statements....

Also, unlike octal literals, it couldn't be replaced by templates
either; inline asm enables things that are otherwise impossible.
There's simply no way for the language to express many of the
instructions available to you in asm. It's a foundational building
block.

This leads into the commonness too. I don't think I've *ever*
wanted an octal literal. But, assembly is useful in 3/5 of
my programs. Heck, even more, if you count library functions
that use it. (though lib functions could in theory be linked
separately)