A machine instruction can only be continued by coding the operands to the end of the line and using a continuation indicator, so once a space or comment on the same line has been encountered, anything starting in column 16 on the next line could only be a comment and there is no ambiguity.
Some statements such as macro instructions use the alternative statement format, where an operand can be followed by a comma and continued in column 16 on the next line, and the operands may be followed by comments on each line. In this case, if there is no comma following the operands but there is text in column 16 on the next line, this might indicate incorrect continuation, so the FLAG(CONT) warning is issued. See the Language Reference topic "Continuation Lines" for full details. Jonathan Scott, HLASM IBM Hursley, UK
