[avr-gcc-list] How to get the GCC to use the swap instruction?

[Jerry Quinn]

Tehn Yit Chin writes:
 > Hi all,
 > 
 > I want to swap the nibbles in a byte, but I can't seem to get the GCC to use
 > the SWAP instruction without using assembler? Does anybody know how to do
 > it?

I suspect the answer is that gcc doesn't do this because it doesn't
consider a nibble to be a complete data type.  If there was a halfchar
datatype, then you could expect gcc to do it for you.

So the short answer is 'no, use assembler'.  If it's wrapped in a
macro, this shouldn't be too bad.  Something like this (warning - I
haven't tried it):

#define swap_nibble(a) { asm("swap %0": "=r" (a) : "r" (a)); }


Something like this might make a useful addition to the libc package.

Jerry Quinn
avr-gcc-list at http://avr1.org