The frontend isn't very smart. It does no fancy arg parsing, no key interpretation or cursor manipulation or TUI goodness that everyone knows and loves. It does four things: Read. Evaluate. Print. Loop. Basic REPL. It doesn't even check whether you're running interactively or not.

By default, the assembler operates in repl mode, and each line is treated in isolation. This is great for quickly looking up an instruction.

To parse an entire file at once, and get useful context when there's a parse error, pipe it in through stdin with - as such:

cat valid.asm | msp430-asm -f

You can press Ctrl+D on Linux to emit an EOF over the terminal.

Motivations

Microcorruption's assembler sucks
I got tired of stringly-typed Python
I wanted to write a parser
I wanted to write Rust
I'm a fan of interactive programs