I very often use it to define location and length of a composite set of variables. Your END idea would not help me. And don’t we do plain constants like hash table size? Don’t think length is always known early enough. And bits in a flag byte?
Rob On Wed, 1 Aug 2018 at 18:34, Steve Smith <[email protected]> wrote: > EQU * is a very common idiom in assembler programming. I'd like to submit > for your consideration that it is wrong, 100% of the time. > > Any symbol referencing memory should always be defined with DS/DC, so the > correct alignment can be specified. * per se, is a very useful concept, > just not on EQU. But as far as I can see, every EQU * is a bug, either > latent or actual. > > The most acceptable usage would be to generate the length of an area (*-X), > but even that can easily be done by defining an 'end' symbol, so that EQU > X-Y is available. > > If I'm overlooking something, I hardly have to ask... but tell me if > there's no better way for some example. > > -- > sas >
