The structured programming macros in HLASM are just too sweet to ignore. Make your programming life easier by adopting them. The SELECT statement works like Java’s SWITCH except the default behavior is to exit each case automatically (no pesky BREAKs) – just as God intended. The code below examines a two-byte character field that contains a 01 for January, 02 for February, …, 12 for December. The code substitutes a character version of the month in the output. Notice how clean the code looks compared to what we would write in native assembler.
SELECT CLC,MONTHIN,EQ
WHEN =C'01'
MVC MNTHOUT,=CL9'JANUARY'
WHEN =C'02'
MVC MNTHOUT,=CL9'FEBRUARY'
WHEN =C'03'
MVC MNTHOUT,=CL9'MARCH'
WHEN =C'04'
MVC MNTHOUT,=CL9'APRIL'
WHEN =C'05'
MVC MNTHOUT,=CL9'MAY'
WHEN =C'06'
MVC MNTHOUT,=CL9'JUNE'
WHEN =C'07'
MVC MNTHOUT,=CL9'JULY'
WHEN =C'08'
MVC MNTHOUT,=CL9'AUGUST'
WHEN =C'09'
MVC MNTHOUT,=CL9'SEPTEMBER'
WHEN =C'10'
MVC MNTHOUT,=CL9'OCTOBER'
WHEN =C'11'
MVC MNTHOUT,=CL9'NOVEMBER'
WHEN =C'12'
MVC MNTHOUT,=CL9'DECEMBER'
OTHRWISE
MVC MNTHOUT,=CL9'UNKNOWN'
ENDSEL
Just so you can see the difference, here is part of the generated code, which would be similar to the code we would write without the macro:
SELECT CLC,MONTHIN,EQ
WHEN =C'01'
+ CLC MONTHIN,=C'01'
+ BC 7,#@LB2
MVC MNTHOUT,=CL9'JANUARY'
WHEN =C'02'
+ BC 15,#@LB1 SKIP TO END
+#@LB2 DC 0H
+ CLC MONTHIN,=C'02'
+ BC 7,#@LB4
MVC MNTHOUT,=CL9'FEBRUARY'
WHEN =C'03'
+ BC 15,#@LB1 SKIP TO END
+#@LB4 DC 0H
+ CLC MONTHIN,=C'03'
+ BC 7,#@LB6
MVC MNTHOUT,=CL9'MARCH'
WHEN =C'04'
+ BC 15,#@LB1 SKIP TO END
Which is easier to debug and understand?
