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Status Not under consideration
Categories Assembler
Created by Guest
Created on Nov 19, 2015

Option to check instruction-to-field mismatches

Looking for an option which when specified would have HLASM report instances where the instruction mismatched the data that it would operate on. Like "check that I am using instructions that match the data length of the field".

Idea priority High
  • Guest
    Reply
    |
    Sep 16, 2020

    This RFE is one of a small group which had apparently been set aside incorrectly years ago and subsequently overlooked. We are sorry for the delay.

    The development team previously investigated various possibilities for optional operand type checking, including length checks, as a possible feature of the TYPECHECK option introduced for HLASM 1.5 in 2004. However, when similar checks were applied experimentally to existing source code, they either caused a surprisingly large number of false warnings (including in code generated by system macro instructions) or they failed to detect genuine errors, so these checks were not implemented at the time. There are also now many z/Architecture instructions where mask or length operands determine the type and length of other operands, making assembly-time checking very tricky.

    We understand the requirement, and are keeping it on file, and it may be possible in future to identify and implement a level of length checking which would provide a useful benefit for a reasonable amount of effort. However, this currently has a low priority compared with other work so we are unlikely to implement this in the near future, so at present we cannot accept this request.