I'm not clear on what you (Joseph Reichman) are attempting to accomplish. If you are going to produce a Rexx program that does something with symbols which appear in some form of an assembler data structure, then you could do something like the example shown below and (as others have suggested) subsequently process the SYSADATA file with the Rexx program.
D-Loc Object Code Addr1 Addr2 Stmt Source Statement 00000000 00000000 00000046 1 TEST DSECT , 00000000 4040404040404040 2 X1 DC 7CL10' ' 00000046 3 X2 DC 0CL20' ' 00000000 00000046 4 GROUP1 EQU X1,*-X1,C'C' 5 End , Symbol Cross Reference Symbol Length Value Id Type Asm Program Defn References GROUP1 70 00000000 FFFFFFFF C 4 TEST 1 00000000 FFFFFFFF J 1 X1 10 00000000 FFFFFFFF C C 2 4 X2 20 00000046 FFFFFFFF C C 3 Dsect Cross Reference Dsect Length Id Defn Con Member TEST 00000046 FFFFFFFF 1 PRIMARY INPUT Here is an extraction from the High Level Assembler Language Reference (V1.6) regarding length attributes of symbols when the "Duplication Factor" is zero: * A duplication factor of zero is permitted, except for literals, * with the following results: * * - No value is assembled. * * - Alignment is forced according to the type of constant * specified, if no length attribute is present. * * - The length attribute of the symbol naming the constant is * established according to the implicitly or explicitly specified * length. For reasons lost in antiquity, an explicitly specified Length value must be positive, e.g., CL0' ' is invalid. Note that: - The Length Attribute of symbol X1 is 10 (decimal) even though it occupies 70 bytes. - The Length Attribute of symbol X2 is 20 (decimal) even though it occupies zero bytes. - The GROUP1 equate gets you the origin location and proper length of a collection of items. There are all kinds of quirks and inconsistencies in how the assembler treats the length attributes of symbols. For example, the length attribute of a DSECT (e.g., L'TEST in this coding example) is always 1 even though the proper length is reflected in the DSECT Cross Reference.
