It doesn't need to link. That is the complete program. Are you suggesting I need to pass a flag to the C++ compiler to disable the linker? How do I do that?
No, that is right, assembly doesn't work in what looks like the output of a Unix shell. Assembly is intended to be input to an assembler. Easy mistake to make, I suppose.
Funny, I haven't told you anything about the architecture yet. But as you don't want to use the tools anyway and it is only a three byte program for the target machine, the good news is that it can quite easily be assembled by hand. Now, back to the C++ problem, any idea what the next step to get us past the issue?