Ordinary symbols

Ordinary symbols can be used in the name and operand fields of machine and assembler instruction statements. There are two types of ordinary symbol, internal and external. Code them to conform to these rules:

The symbol must not consist of more than 63 alphanumeric characters. The first character must be an alphabetic character. An alphabetic character is a letter from A through Z, or from a through z, or $, _, #, or @. The other characters in the symbol can be alphabetic characters, digits, or a combination of the two.
- The assembler does not distinguish between upper-case and lower-case letters used in symbols.
- If the GOFF option is not specified, external symbols must not consist of more than eight characters.
- No other special characters can be included in an ordinary symbol.
- No spaces are allowed in an ordinary symbol.
- No double-byte data is allowed in an ordinary symbol.

External symbols are placed in the External Symbol Dictionary of the object module, where they are available to link editors and binders for linking with other separately translated programs. Internal symbols are normally discarded at the end of the assembly, but might be placed in the SYSADATA file (see "Input and output files" in the HLASM Programmer's Guide) for use by other programs such as debuggers.

In the following sections, the term symbol refers to the ordinary symbol.

The following examples are valid ordinary symbols:

ORDSYM#435A         HERE           $OPEN
K4                  #0123          X
B49467LITTLENAIL    @33            _TOTAL_SAVED