Hackaday

A developer created xa.sh, a fully functional cross-assembler for Intel 8080 machine code written entirely in Bourne shell script. The project demonstrates the power of standard Unix shell combined with POSIX-compliant command-line tools like awk, sed, and printf. While not particularly efficient and having some syntax quirks (like avoiding $ for hexadecimal notation), it works and is designed to easily support additional architectures like 6502 and 6809. The assembler runs on any system with standard command-line tools from the last thirty years.

Full-Blown Cross-Assembler…in A Bash Script