I wrote earlier:
We do not yet know the exact cause, or a fix, although we think it is probably something to do with changes in the gcc-3.x series compiler that break various assumptions made by the nhc98 code generator.
In fact, by chance another nhc98-user reported a similar failure
yesterday, and was able to give me access to the machine on which the
failure occurred. This enabled me to discover the cause and find
a fix, which in his case was due to a change in the assembler code
format between gcc-3.2 and gcc-3.3.
If you are also using gcc-3.3, then it is possible that the same fix
might cure your build error as well.
To try it out, please delete your build tree, and unpack a fresh copy.
Then apply the patch attached to this message, which should contain
all the fixes we already discussed for the mips-irix6 build, together
with the new fix. If you are not familiar with the patch utility,
it should be as simple as this:
cd nhc98-1.16
patch -p1