Actually, DS does sort of guarantee what is there -- whatever was there before. Consider the following (and I would *never* do this sort of thing anymore!) -- and watch out for deleted line breaks -- the example should be 5 lines of code:
DC C'ABC' ORG *-3 DC C'X' DS C DC C'Z' The area is guaranteed (if that is the right word) to contain 'XBZ'. Charles -----Original Message----- From: IBM Mainframe Assembler List [mailto:ASSEMBLER-LIST@LISTSERV.UGA.EDU] On Behalf Of Steve Smith Sent: Thursday, August 2, 2018 8:07 AM To: ASSEMBLER-LIST@LISTSERV.UGA.EDU Subject: Re: EQU * considered harmful Yes, DS "skips" bytes for alignment, and those skipped aren't guaranteed to be anything. But why would you care? In any case, plain DC 0H (or any other unit) has been supported for a long time, if not from the beginning of HLASM. I don't care what's in padding, but DC does pad with 00 text, and more usefully, prints the padding. I often want to eliminate alignment gaps. Also, for those who care, it doesn't break up text generation in the object deck.
