Building a phrase with literals about octo

[JohnEarnest]

The new :macro facility resolves this nicely, as I'd hoped when I originally suggested it. The following program:

:macro foo { 0xAA }
:macro bar { 0xBB }

: main
	foo
	bar

Will compile as the bytes 0xAA 0xBB.

[JohnEarnest]

I replied to your email, but just for the purposes of keeping things documented I'll summarize here:

Constants declared with :const are treated exactly like labels when used outside of instructions. The difference between the patterns here is that the constant references are compiled into calls to subroutines. This functionality is already used for building jump tables and by the disassembler for various reasons. It would be possible to alter the semantics of :const to get the desired behavior, but I think a better resolution would be to create a new construct with this type of purpose in mind.

One proposal is the addition of a :macro operative which would allow you to assign a name to a pattern of bytes which would be inlined wherever the name of the macro was used. A particularly nice aspect of this system is it could serve to simplify some parts of the existing assembler and make it easier to experiment with custom extended instruction sets. I'll give the precise syntax and semantics some thought and update this issue when I come to a final decision.