What's the best assembly compiler to buy?  So far all I have found is
Turbo Assembler and A86 (ick).

                                                Miles Thomason

     Well, this kinda violates the terms of this newsgroup (no flames),
but I'll post anyway.  Here's the good thing about four major assemblers:

TASM - I think this is technically the best, but it's hard to find, and if
you don't buy directly from Borland, it's expensive.  I also hear that it
has poor documentation.  I think it's fully compatible with MASM, or at
least up to some older version (3.0?)

MASM - I think this one is slightly inferior to TASM, but I've heard the
documentation is better than TASM's.  It's also expensive, even if you buy
it directly from MS.

A86 - The best thing that this one has going for it is that it's cheap (I
think $50 is the registration price).  It also has a shareware version.  I
don't know much about this one since the last version of it I had could
only do 286 operations, but I'm fairly sure this has improved.

WASM - Watcom's assembler comes with Watcom's C++ package, which I think
is the best (game) development package for DOS in existance.  It comes
with DOS4/GW, too.  I don't think you can buy it seperately.  This one's
great if you want to do some DOS games, but otherwise it's basically
worthless.

Well, I tried not to be biased, but I think the best overall is TASM (but
I'm not fortunate enough to own it).

R> TASM - I think this is technically the best, but it's hard to find, and if
R> you don't buy directly from Borland, it's expensive.  I also hear that it
R> has poor documentation.  I think it's fully compatible with MASM, or at
R> least up to some older version (3.0?)

With 5.1; freeware ARROWASM is MASM 3.0 compatible.
(the ARROWASM can be found in VALARROW package on SIMTEL)