"(nearly) constant" means you can pick either (a) a constant blob, at the cost of a fixed image size, à la COM, or (b) patch up length (one or two places, iirc) if you're feeling fancy.
In one of my other compiler books (http://t3x.org/t3x/book.html) I just use a template for the ELF header, but I still think it adds too much complexity. One reader complained about it.
Thanks, I thought so, too, but I can also understand that the comments are not very helpful, if you know nothing about linkers, paging, and object files.
I think I adopted IE/ELSE from BCPL, but thought that IE is nicer than TEST, because it is itself short for If/Else and because it looks almost like IF.
"(nearly) constant" means you can pick either (a) a constant blob, at the cost of a fixed image size, à la COM, or (b) patch up length (one or two places, iirc) if you're feeling fancy.