>When labels were limited to 8 characters That was an improvement over the 5 characters that we had on the 650 or the 6 characters that we had on the 7090.
-- Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz http://mason.gmu.edu/~smetz3 ________________________________________ From: IBM Mainframe Assembler List <[email protected]> on behalf of Peter Relson <[email protected]> Sent: Friday, August 3, 2018 7:46 AM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: EQU * considered harmful > B *+12 I have no evidence one way or the other, but I wonder whether the writers of the "old" macros that used this style did so because they liked it (I think we can all agree that we now hate it), or because they wanted to avoid clutter of the listing or clutter of the XREF due to the extra labels (thus increasing the size of the listing at a time when that translated into a real cost of printing), or whether maybe assembler F (that's the earliest IBM assembler I ever worked with) had limits that they were worried about running aground upon, or ... I wonder if it had to do with to label uniqueness. When labels were limited to 8 characters (as they were at that time), even with &SYSNDX, maybe there was some concern about interfering with a user-created label. Nowadays, macroname_&SYSNDX is something we probably wouldn't mind creating as a label. Peter Relson z/OS Core Technology Design
