It's in our code, mostly introduced, I believe, by a life-long assembler coder who meant it to signal that this value is zero at assembly but will be filled at execution time by, for example, the address of a module after a LOAD macro. He also used it for the length value in an EXecute instruction. I think in both cases he was trying to signal future programmers reading the code that they shouldn't assume that if the value is zero at assembly, it will be zero at execution time. He hoped that using *-* would make the experienced programmers think and the inexperienced ones ask about it. We did.
On 2020-04-29 5:00 p.m., Mark Boonie 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
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