Assembler
Directives
The assembler directives do not emit machine language but, as the name
indicates,
direct the assembler to perform certain operations only during the assembly
process.
Here are a number of directives
that we shall discuss.
CSECT Identifies
the start or continuation of a control section.
DSECT Identifies
the start or continuation of a dummy control
section,
which is used to pass data to subroutines.
EJECT Start
a new page before continuing the assembler listing.
END End
of the assembler module or control section.
EQU Equate
a symbol to a name or number.
LTORG Begin
the literal pool.
PRINT Sets
some options for the assembly listing.
SPACE Provides
for line spacing in the assembler listing.
START Define
the start of the first control section in a program.
TITLE Provide a title at the top of each page of assembler
listing.
USING Indicates the base registers to use in addressing.
CSECT
By definition, a control section (CSECT), is “a block of
coding that can be relocated
(independent of other coding) without altering the operating logic of the
program.”*
Every program to be executed
must have at least one control section.
If the program has only one
control section, as is usually the case, we may begin it
with either a CSECT or START directive.
According to Abel, a START directive
“defines the start of the first control
section
in a program”**, though he
occasionally contradicts himself.
We shall later discuss reasons
why a program might need more than one control
section. In this case, it is probably
best to use only the CSECT directive.
* The definition is taken from
page 109 of Programming Assembler
Language by
Peter Abel, 3rd Edition, ISBN 0 – 13 –728924 – 3. The segment in quotes is taken
directly from Abel, who also has it in quotes.
The source is some IBM document.
** Abel, page 577. But see page 40. Abel has trouble giving a definition.
DSECT
A DSECT (Dummy
Section) is used to describe a data
area without actually
reserving any storage for it.
This is used to pass arguments
from one program to another.
Consider a main program and a
subroutine.
The main program will use the
standard data definitions to lay out the data.
The subroutine will use a DSECT, with the same
structure, in order to
reference the original data.
The calling mechanism will pass
the address of the original data.
The subroutine will associate
that with its DSECT and use the structure
found in the DSECT to generate proper addresses for the arguments.
We shall discuss Dummy Sections
in more detail later.
END
The END statement must be the last statement of an assembler
control section.
The form of the statement is
quite simple. It is
END Section_Name
So, our first program had the
following structure.
LAB1
CSECT
Some program statements
END LAB1
Note that it easily could have
been the following.
LAB1
START
Some program statements
END LAB1
EQU
The EQU directive is used to equate a name with an
expression, symbolic address,
or number. Whenever this name is used as
a symbol, it is replaced.
We might do something, such as
the following, which makes the symbol R12 to
be equal to 12, and replaced by that value when the assembler is run.
R12 EQU
12
There are also uses in which
symbolic addresses are equated. Consider
this example.
PRINT DC CL133’’
P EQU PRINT
Each symbol references the same address
One can also use the location
counter, denoted by “*”, to set the symbol equal to
the current address. This example sets
the symbol RETURN to the current address.
RETURN
EQU * BRANCH TO HERE FOR NORMAL RETURN
The Location
Counter
As the assembler reads the text
of a program, from top to bottom, it establishes
the amount of memory required for each instruction or item of data.
The Location Counter is used to establish
the address for each item. Consider
an instruction or data item that requires N bytes for storage.
The
action of the assembler can be thought of as follows:
1. The
assembler produces the binary machine language equivalent of the
data item or instruction. This bit of machine language is N bytes long.
2. The
machine language fragment is stored at address LC (Location Counter).
3. The
Location Counter is incremented by N.
The new value is used to
store the next data item or
instruction.
The
location counter is denoted by the asterisk “*”. One might
have code such as.
SAVE DS CL3
KEEP EQU *+5
Suppose the symbol SAVE is associated with location X’3012’. It reserves 3 bytes for
storage, so the location counter is set to X’3015’ after assembling the item.
The symbol KEEP is now associated with X’3015’ + X’5’ = X’301A’
LTORG
The
Literal Pool contains a collection of anonymous constant definitions, which are
generated by the assembler. The LTORG directive defines the start of a literal
pool.
While
some textbooks may imply that the LTORG directive is not necessary for use
of literals, your instructor’s experience is different. It appears that an explicit LTORG
directive is required if the program uses literal arguments.
The
classic form of the statement is as follows, where the “L” of “LTORG” is
to be found in column 10 of the listing.
LTORG *
Generally,
this statement should be placed near the end of the listing, as in the
next example taken from an actual program.
240 * LITERAL POOL
241 *********************************
000308 242 LTORG *
000308 00000001 243
=F'1'
000000 244 END
LAB1
Here, line 243 shows a literal that is inserted by the
assembler.
PRINT
This directive controls several
options that impact the appearance of the listing.
Two common variants are:
PRINT
ON,NOGEN,NODATA WE USE THIS FOR NOW
PRINT
ON,GEN,NODATA USE THIS WHEN STUDYING MACROS
The first operand is the
listing option. It has two values: ON or OFF.
ON – Print the
program listing from this point on. This
is the normal setting.
OFF – Do not print
the listing.
The second operand controls the
listing of macros, which are single statements that
expand into multiple statements. We
shall investigate them later.
The two options for this
operand are NOGEN and GEN.
GEN – Print
all the statements that a macro generates.
NOGEN – Suppress
the generated code. This is the standard
option.
The third
operand controls printing of the hexadecimal values of constants.
DATA Print the full hexadecimal value of
all constants.
NODATA Print only
the leftmost 16 hex digits of the constants.
USING
A typical
use would be found in our first lab assignment.
BALR
R12,0 ESTABLISH
USING *,R12 ADDRESSABILITY
The
structure of this pair of instructions is entirely logical, though it may
appear as quite strange.
First
note that the USING *,R12 is a directive, so that it does not generate binary
machine language code.
The BALR R12,0 is an incomplete
subroutine call. It loads the
address of the
next instruction (the one following the USING, since that is not an instruction)
into R12 in preparation for a Branch and
Link that is never executed.
The USING * part of the
directive tells the assembler to use R12 as a base
register and begin displacements for addressing from the next instruction.
The
mechanism, base register and offset, is used by IBM in order to save space.
It serves to save memory space.
We shall
study it later.
Directives
Associated with the Listing
Here is a list of some of the
directives used to affect the appearance of the
printed listing that usually was a result of the program execution process.
In our class, this listing can
be seen in the Output Queue, but is never actually
printed on paper. As a result, these directives
are mostly curiosities.
EJECT This causes a page to be ejected before it is full. The assembler keeps
a count of lines on a page
and will automatically eject when a specified
count (maybe 66) is
reached. One can issue an early page
break.
SPACE This tells the assembler to place a number of blank lines between
each line of the text in
the listing. Values are 1, 2, .
SPACE
SPACE 1 Each causes
normal spacing of the lines
SPACE 2 Double spacing; one blank line after each line of text
SPACE 3 Triple spacing; 2 blank lines after each line of text.
TITLE This allows any descriptive title to be placed at the top of
each listing page.
The title is placed
between two single quotes.
TITLE ‘THIS IS A GOOD
TITLE’