The plan behind of as2c.pl is and was to create compiler independant machine code for an architecture. masm, gas, nasm, whatever syntax doesn't fit all compilers. Therefore as2c.pl translates gas syntax to a bytestring, which is then used as the asm code. as2c's usage is indeed scarce: when the code is generated once and checked in, there's usually no need to change it later.
leo
