I wrote:
> ... that assembler likes "$" for current location. I did a quick check on my
> oldest OS X PPC box, and it seems to be happy with "$" as well, so maybe
> we can use that --- though I see nothing about "$" in the GNU Assembler
> manual, which makes me a bit worried about whether it works on all PPC
> systems.
A look into the current gas sources finds this in config/tc-ppc.h:
/* $ is used to refer to the current location. */
#define DOLLAR_DOT
so apparently this is indeed standard behavior for gas on PPC. There's
no indication that you could turn it off without manually hacking this
config header.
Source code access to one's tools is so pleasant ...
regards, tom lane