Paul Gilmartin asked:
>The assembler ought to be
>able to reduce any pair of terms having the same relocatability
>attribute and opposite sign to an Absolute value?
>Is any of this restriction due to Binder's inability to relocate
>bit fields of all lengths and offsets (even discontiguous)
>supported nowadays in machine instructions?
HLASM does appear to handle paired relocatable terms as absolute:
000000 00000 00010 1 rr csect
R:F 00000 2 using *,15
000000 3 a ds f
000004 4 b ds f
000008 A718 0004 00004 5 lhi 1,b-a
00000C 9504 F000 00000 6 cli a,b-a
7 end
Extending similar support to the Binder would require major extensions to
existing object module formats; and to date, there seems to have been no
need for it.
John Ehrman
