Ooh. Don't know if I like that or if the "WTF?" factor for *+8 as a "label"
is too great.

Charles


-----Original Message-----
From: IBM Mainframe Assembler List [mailto:[email protected]]
On Behalf Of Phil Smith III
Sent: Thursday, August 2, 2018 7:02 AM
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: EQU * considered harmful

Charles Mills wrote:

>I have a house rule to use J (not B!) *+n only to jump over a single
instruction, never more than one. Yeah, it may be a problem waiting to
happen, especially now with machine instruction length a little less
intuitive (change A to AG and there goes your J *+8). What I like about it
is that labels invite the question "who jumps here?"* so if I can avoid a
label I do. It's a tradeoff. No one ever said assembler coding was for the
faint-hearted.

 

I did that until recently (like a year ago), when somebody convinced me it
was evil. Well, convinced me enough to stop; I sort of agree that if you
can't handle it, don't be doin' no assembler, but I still stopped. I used to
use this format:

     TM   FLAG,BIT

     JO   *+8

     L    R1,WHATEVER

*+8  DS   0H

 

That made it clear where it was going and thus made it harder (I think) to
insert stuff blindly, while not encouraging anyone else to branch there :)

 

...phsiii

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