I you have trouble pounding in nails with a screwdriver and turning screws with a hammer, it's not the tools that are defective. EQU is important to understandable programming. I could equally well make a case that LA is bad because someone had misused it.
-- Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz http://mason.gmu.edu/~smetz3 ________________________________________ From: IBM Mainframe Assembler List <ASSEMBLER-LIST@listserv.uga.edu> on behalf of Steve Smith <sasd...@gmail.com> Sent: Wednesday, August 1, 2018 12:34 PM To: ASSEMBLER-LIST@listserv.uga.edu Subject: EQU * considered harmful EQU * is a very common idiom in assembler programming. I'd like to submit for your consideration that it is wrong, 100% of the time. Any symbol referencing memory should always be defined with DS/DC, so the correct alignment can be specified. * per se, is a very useful concept, just not on EQU. But as far as I can see, every EQU * is a bug, either latent or actual. The most acceptable usage would be to generate the length of an area (*-X), but even that can easily be done by defining an 'end' symbol, so that EQU X-Y is available. If I'm overlooking something, I hardly have to ask... but tell me if there's no better way for some example. -- sas
