On Wed May 16 16:26:58 2012 [email protected] wrote:
> But most of all would be some way to imply the length of the second
> operand on SS format instructions. I cant begin to imagine how much time
> I have spent counting the length of some second operand and having to
> manually code its length in the first operand. This is time consuming and
> error prone and should be done by the Assembler.
Well the reason it's not is to stop people from trying to stuff 10 pounds
of data in a 5 pound bag. The length, if not specified explictly, has to be
the length of the receiving field. And this has its problems too when you
run off the end of the page or move garbage because the receiving field is
shorter than the sending field. Bottom line, you really should be s
pecifying lengths explicitly and it's very easy to do. And you shouldn't be
using literals in code.
What about something like this (sorry for any line wrap):
PRINTLINE DS CL133
SOME-FIELD DS 8
.
.
MVI PRINTLINE,X'40' SET FIRST CHAR BLANK
MVC PRINTLINE+1(L'PRINTLINE-1),PRINTLINE BLANK REMAINDER OF
PRINTLINE
MVC PRINTLINE(L'SOME-FIELD),SOME-FIELD MOVE THE RIGHT LENGTH!
As far as the original post goes, call me easy to please, but I have been
coding in assembler since MFT (and this is not bragging on this list
because I know guys older and more experienced than I hang out here) and I
really don't have anything that bothers me enough to file and RFE on the
assembler. If anything it has more than enough good stuff and very little
bad.
