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Status Not under consideration
Workspace IBM High Level Assembler for z/OS and z/VM
Categories Toolkit
Created by Guest
Created on May 9, 2016

RELATED IDEAS

Structured Programming Macros: support parenthetical grouping of logical conditions via parentheses

Support for parenthetical grouping of logical conditions is currently only possible by using the ANDIF and ORIF operators. This is because the Structured Programming Macros do not support the use of parentheses to specify logical hierarchy of conditions. Parentheses would be the much preferred syntax in such cases.

For example, rather than coding this:

IF LTR,R1,R1,NZ, +
AND, +
LTR,R2,R2,NZ, +
ORIF, +
LTR,R3,R3,NZ, +
AND, +
LTR,R4,R4,NZ

we would much rather code it this way:

IF ((LTR,R1,R1,NZ), +
AND, +
(LTR,R2,R2,NZ)), +
OR, +
((LTR,R3,R3,NZ), +
AND, +
(LTR,R4,R4,NZ))

We would be more than happy to supply the additional parentheses to specify the logical groupings (instead of using ANDIF/ORIF).

Idea priority Medium
  • Guest
    Reply
    |     Sep 28, 2020

    We feel that the current structured programming macros have evolved into a new language which has become quite complex and confusing. Although the structured programming macros greatly improve readability and productivity for simple cases, in more complex cases they can become difficult to understand and quite error-prone, for example because of layout problems with indentation and parentheses.

    Clearly if we were re-inventing these macros from scratch, it would have been better to follow the usual high-level language conventions, but we are concerned that introducing the new high-level language scheme as an alternative could actually increase confusion, especially when working with existing code, and it would also require a lot of implementation work and testing.

    We were previously sent two alternative implementations which included support for this requirement, but in both cases there were so many other changes that we could not use them as is, and we found bugs and incompatibilities which would have needed further investigation, so we could not even use those implementations without a lot of additional work.

    Another problem is that the existing macros do not make it practical to include additional instructions such as loads or subroutine calls while evaluating a condition. Even if more complex condition expressions were supported, this restriction would make it difficult to exploit them. And it is not very tidy having to code instructions within operands anyway.

    We are currently considering alternative ways to extend the macros, for example allowing additional conditions to be evaluated using sequences of ordinary instructions separated by macros to combine conditions. We are therefore declining this request at this time. However, if these alternative ways prove impractical, we may well reconsider this request in future.

    In the meantime, we understand that the documentation for how to use the existing AND, OR, ANDIF and ORIF conditions needs to be clarified, and some suggested improvements for the relevant topics are being passed on to the writers.

    Jonathan Scott, HLASM and Toolkit

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