On Fri, Feb 10, 2012 at 7:01 PM, Bill Fairchild <bfairch...@rocketsoftware.com> wrote:
> E.g., if I need to put "14" in a register I might code > "FOURTEEN EQU 14" > L R4,=A(FOURTEEN) > > But if I code this > L R4,=A(14) > And I want to find the instruction which puts 14 into R4 and I do that with a > find command, then I will also find all instructions involving "R14", which > would likely produce far too many to skip over. Everyone's needs are different. I rarely find myself search for the instructions that use the number 14. More often I want to see where a register is modified or used, so it's helpful to code R4 rather than 4. But both are in the HLASM cross reference. When I see an EQU like TABLESIZE EQU 14 then that suggests that you could change the table size through just a change of the value and would hope that all dependent values are computed from this. It's far less helpful to see this TABLE DS 0F DC ... DC .. .. TABLESIZE EQU 14 One of my predecessors liked fancy constant expressions like LA R1,8+4+6+12-2 which may have been obvious the first minutes after he wrote it... helpful comment in this case was "load length in R1" PS In my "programming quality metrics" I frown upon duplicated comments (so the same remark multiple times in a module). Either they are trivial and describe the instruction rather than its purpose, or it's copied code where the programmer did not bother to change the comment accordingly... Rob
