HLASM Language Reference

Terms, Literals, and Expressions
“Location Counter Reference” on page 37 describes how you can use the current
location counter in a literal.
| The rules for determining whether two literals are identical are:
| 1. A literal which contains a location counter reference is not identical to any other
| literal.
| 2. Otherwise, two literals are identical (and will be generated only once), if their
| source forms are identical.
Contrast with Immediate Data: You should not confuse a literal with the
immediate data in an SI instruction. Immediate data is assembled into the
instruction.
Literal Pool
The literals processed by the assembler are collected and placed in a special area
called the literal pool. You can control the positioning of the literal pool. Unless
otherwise specified, the literal pool is placed at the end of the first control section.
You can also specify that multiple literal pools be created. However, the assembler
controls the sequence in which literals are ordered within the pool. Further
information on positioning literal pools is in “LTORG Instruction” on page 193.
Expressions
This section discusses the expressions used in coding operand entries for source
statements. You can use an expression to specify:
An address
An explicit length
A modifier
A duplication factor
A complete operand
Expressions have absolute and relocatable values. Whether an expression is
absolute or relocatable depends on the value of the terms it contains. The
assembler evaluates relocatable and absolute expressions at assembly time.
Figure 16 on page 45 shows examples of valid expressions.
| In addition to expressions used in coding operand entries, there are three types of
expression that you can use only in conditional assembly instructions: arithmetic,
logical, and character expressions. They are evaluated during conditional
| assembly. For more information, see “Assigning Values to SET Symbols” on
| page 347.
An expression is composed of a single term or an arithmetic combination of terms.
The assembler reduces multiterm expressions to single values. Thus, you do not
have to compute these values yourself. The following are examples of valid
expressions:
44 HLASM V1R5 Language Reference