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Status Not under consideration
Categories Assembler
Created by Guest
Created on Mar 18, 2022

Permit named PUSH/POP statements

When the assembler reaches an END statement, and there remains unPOP'd PUSH USINGs, it issues ASMA138W . Well, in large complex assemblies, finding the unPOP'd PUSH or PUSHs can be rather a challenge.

In my own coding, I have solved that by replacing the PUSH/POP statements with PUSH/POP macros that accept non-blank name fields. Then when I do receive ASMA138W, I can fairly easily find the missing POP by editing the assembly listing, excluding all messages other than the PUSH/POPs, and then pairing them up by name. The presence of name fields makes the pairing process much easier.

My macros do not do anything with the given names. They don't validate them. They don't xref them. They only permit them.

I think that if the assembler were to accept named PUSH/POPs, just doing that would be sufficient. You might consider xref'ing them, and listing the unPOP'd names in the ASMA138W message, but I can't think of any enforcements you'd want to do.

In particular, I don't think unique names should be a requirement, and I do think that nesting violations should be allowed.

Idea priority Medium
  • Guest
    Reply
    |
    Apr 28, 2022
    We understand the point that it might not be easy to locate mismatched PUSH/POP statements in a complex program. However, adding a label to PUSH/POP would be a change to the Assembler language, which needs careful definition of the semantics as well as significant implementation effort. The idea of a label which is not used by the assembler itself does not make much sense, especially as this can already be implemented by a macro. We would therefore assume that the idea of a label is to check matching PUSH and POP. However, as PUSH/POP can process three separate types of resource (PRINT, USING and ACONTROL) it is not clear how labels would be expected to nest when combinations are specified. This also seems a disproportionately complex solution to a relatively trivial and obscure problem.

    We feel that this problem could better be addressed by other methods, involving only diagnostic options or additional information in the listing. For example, it might be helpful to show the resulting PUSH/POP nesting levels in the left part of the listing for the resources mentioned in each visible PUSH/POP statement, so for example PUSH PRINT,USING might show "1 1" meaning that the current PRINT nesting level and USING nesting level are both now 1.

    Even though a listing change like this might be relatively simple (which would need design work to determine), we do not see this as a high priority for our limited resources.

    We are therefore declining this request, but we will add this problem to our long term requirements list along with the suggested listing change as one potential solution.

    - Jonathan Scott, HLASM