Not wanting to beat a dead horse too much, but I ran an experiment using the code in my original post:
Macro &Lab MVC2 &Target,&Source &Lab MVC &Target.(L'&Source),&Source MEND vs. John's provided macro and they generate identical code. I read John's response about the symbol table so I made sure the test using my macro used a unique literal for source (I also have a second test using a designated field) so it was a "first reference" (I don't think we're doing more than the standard 2 pass assembly). The only reason I bring this up is that it seems this could be helpful in a few situations. As I said, I don't want to beat this horse any more, but even though I've been writing assembler for 30 years (including z80, 808x, and 68000 assembler), I still learn a lot from this list. Changing tack slightly, has anyone used MVST in a case where there was the possibility of a missing terminator (i.e. something other than a x'00' as the terminator). It's easily addressed (stick the expected terminator in the last character of the sending field), but just something I encountered today. Thanks again, Mark Hammack On Wed, May 16, 2012 at 4:14 PM, Paul Gilmartin <paulgboul...@aim.com>wrote: > On 2012-05-16 13:10, Ray Mansell wrote: > >> >> Of course, if the assembler were to support the L' construct for >> literals, this would not be a problem. >> >> At least during Pass 2. > > Lookahead is confusing. > > -- gil >