I support John Baker's request to add HLASM option to force odd length literals to next even length by adding pad character when referenced by relative instructions. The single extra pad byte can be added at the time the literal is added to the literal pool reference table without any other special flags required.
The zcobol compiler (www.zcobol.org) which generates labeled HLASM compatilbe baseless procedure division code, ran into this problem and had to wrap all literal generation code inside macro which checked length and padded to even if odd. Using single literal pool with LARL addressing supports literal pool much larger than 4k and avoids generating meaningless labels. zcobol only generates user defined data division and procedure division paragraph labels in the generated HLASM source code. Don Higgins [email protected]
