HLASM: V1R6 Language Ref

Terms, literals, and expressions0 - 0000 4 - 0100 8 - 1000 C - 11001 - 0001 5 - 0101 9 - 1001 D - 11012 - 0010 6 - 0110 A - 1010 E - 11103 - 0011 7 - 0111 B - 1011 F - 1111When used as an absolute term in an expression, a hexadecimal self-defining termhas a negative value if the high-order bit is 1.||Binary self-defining term: A binary self-defining term is written as an unsignedsequence of 1s and 0s enclosed in single quotation marks and preceded by theletter B; for example, B'10001101'. A binary term may have up to 32 bits, notcounting leading zero bits. This allows a range of values from −2,147,483,648through 2,147,483,647.When used as an absolute term in an expression, a binary self-defining term has anegative value if the term is 32 bits long and the high-order bit is 1.Binary representation is used primarily in designating bit patterns of masks or inlogical operations.The following shows a binary term used as a mask in a Test Under Mask (TM)instruction. The contents of GAMMA are to be tested, bit by bit, against the pattern ofbits represented by the binary term.ALPHA TM GAMMA,B’10101101’Character self-defining term: A character self-defining term consists of 1-to-4characters enclosed in single quotation marks, and must be preceded by the letterC. All letters, decimal digits, and special characters may be used in a characterself-defining term. In addition, any of the remaining EBCDIC characters may bedesignated in a character self-defining term. Examples of character self-definingterms are:C’/’C’ ’ (space)C’ABC’C’13’34 HLASM: V1R6 Language RefBecause of the use of single quotation marks in the assembler language andampersands in the macro language as syntactic characters, the following rule mustbe observed when using these characters in a character self-defining term:For each single quotation mark or ampersand you want in a characterself-defining term, two single quotation marks or ampersands must be written.For example, the character value A'# would be written as 'A''#', while a singlequotation mark followed by a space and another single quotation mark wouldbe written as ''' '''.For C-type character self-defining terms, each character in the character sequence isassembled as its 8-bit code equivalent (see Appendix D, “Standard character setcode table,” on page 417). The two single quotation marks or ampersands thatmust be used to represent a single quotation mark or ampersand within thecharacter sequence are assembled as a single quotation mark or ampersand.Double-byte data may appear in a character self-defining term, if the DBCSassembler option is specified. The assembled value includes the SO and SIdelimiters. Hence a character self-defining term containing double-byte data islimited to one double-byte character delimited by SO and SI. For example, C''.Since the SO and SI are stored, the null double-byte character string, C'', is alsoa valid character self-defining term.