> About 15 years ago I concluded that DSECTs, equates and defined constants > are your friends when coding in Assembler.
Me too, except it was about 35 years ago. I think what you say is a widely-held "good programming practices" manta. However, in the intervening years, I have come to a different conclusion. Which is easier for your successor - or you after your memory starts to fail :-) - to decipher: CLC SOMEDATA,=C'XYZ' or CLC SOMEDATA,CONSTANT where constant is some DC field that has to be tracked down somewhere, perhaps in some other source file such as a macro or COPY member. I suppose the answer is "it depends" but I don't think you can argue that the use of the named constant is always clearer. In my case, the decision TO use defined constants was driven by the ease of changing a single punched card near the bottom of the deck and the fact that a defined constant was easier to track down in a listing cross-reference. Today, when FIND and CHG ALL are universally available, I don't believe that defined constants are ALWAYS better than in-line literals. Charles -----Original Message----- From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Chase, John Sent: Thursday, October 06, 2005 5:33 AM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: Order of Operands (was Re: JES2 Exit6 - Changing Class= Based on PGM=) About 15 years ago I concluded that DSECTs, equates and defined constants are your friends when coding in Assembler. Thus: ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html
