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This is an interesting suggestion, but unfortunately not very practical.
HLASM system variables provide information either about the overall environment (such as job name) or about the current status during HLASM first pass processing. The RMODE of a section is neither of these; it is an attribute of a control section which may not be resolved until the end of the first pass. If an RMODE or CATTR statement is found with a matching section name, it is used to set the RMODE, but if no such statement is found by the end of the first pass, the RMODE is set to the default value, which is normally 24 but may be affected by an AMODE specification for the same section. The RMODE and AMODE values may also of course be modified at link-edit time.
If the relevant RMODE statement occurs before the macro which needs to use it, it is possible to capture the RMODE value by using a macro near the start of the program to set up an intercept for the RMODE statement. The macro first uses the OPSYN statement to establish a synonym for the standard RMODE instruction then uses OPSYN again to route the RMODE instruction through a macro, so that it can record the RMODE value for the specified section name in a global variable but pass the operands to the standard RMODE instruction. A similar technique can be used to detect and tolerate multiple RMODE instructions for the same section provided that they are compatible.
This request as it stands is rejected for the following reasons:
1. RMODE or AMODE is a section attribute, not part of the current processing environment or status, so it does not belong in a system variable as in the suggested solution. If it were possible to determine the relevant value, the mechanism would probably need to be a built-in function, like SYSATTRA or SYSATTRP.
2. The RMODE value would only be known if the RMODE (or CATTR) statement preceded the macro testing it (in the same way that SYSATTRA or SYSATTRP can only test attributes of a symbol which is already defined), and even then it could be overriden at link-edit time, so a built-in function would be of limited use.
We have however noted that if the area of built-in functions is opened up for further development in future, a general function to retrieve section attributes (if known) could be useful.