Interesting. The HLASM team's dance card is already pretty full but you can certainly picture something like that in HLASM:
J *+3I Meaning "here + 3 instructions." 'I' is perhaps not the best indicator because it is easily confused with a digit, although J *+n seldom ends in a legitimate 1. Yes, the assembler would have to do look-ahead. Yes, HLASM would have to impose some limits and caveats. I'm not crazy about it. It solves the "what if the instruction length changes, such as from A to AG?" problem, but not the "what if someone hastily and with inadequate thought inserts or deletes an instruction?" problem. Charles -----Original Message----- From: IBM Mainframe Assembler List [mailto:ASSEMBLER-LIST@LISTSERV.UGA.EDU] On Behalf Of Peter Relson Sent: Saturday, August 4, 2018 7:23 AM To: ASSEMBLER-LIST@LISTSERV.UGA.EDU Subject: Re: EQU * considered harmful >"This isn't a 'real' branch-that is, we aren't going very far..." Donald Knuth's assembler, which we had available in college in the 70's, had the concept of a "relative label". I can't remember if there was one name pattern for "forward" and one for "backward" or whether you couldn't use it for "backward". It avoided unnecessarily unreadable label names, and avoided the uniqueness problem. And when used properly (i.e., well within a "screen" amout) it was perfectly clear. The label name was like "1R" for "first one ahead, relative" or perhaps it was "find the first 1R label ahead", for example J 1R When used appropriately (as a substitue for all of these *+small_number types of cases) it avoided the maintainability problems of having to know how long everything was.
