I always assumed that *-* indicated that the author grew up on the 709/7090/7094/7040/7044, where ** was synonymous with *-* and indicated 0.
-- Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz http://mason.gmu.edu/~smetz3 ________________________________________ From: IBM Mainframe Assembler List [[email protected]] on behalf of Kerry Liles [[email protected]] Sent: Wednesday, April 29, 2020 5:08 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: *-* I always thought that some programmers did that as an "eye catcher" to indicate that the value might nominally be zero but it will be dynamically modified elsewhere... (perhaps by an EX or worse - direct smashing) A naked zero is not remarkable but *-* is sort of jarring... to the reader. On Wed, 29 Apr 2020 at 17:00, Mark Boonie <[email protected]> wrote: > I've probably been writing assembler for too long to be asking this > question now, but what is the purpose of coding '*-*' in some assembler > expressions? I've seen it in parameter lists (usually as an adcon), > operands of executed instruction (e.g., MVC 0(*-*,5),0(6)), etc. As far as > I can tell it effectively operates the same as '0', so it must mean > something to the coder and/or the reader (but not to this reader). Any > insights? > > - mb >
