Conditional assembly

The conditional-assembly directives allow you to include or exclude portions of an assembly depending on how a pair of expressions, or a pair of strings, compare.

The overall structure of conditionals is familiar from many other contexts. .AIF marks the start of a conditional, and precedes assembly for the case when the condition is true. An optional .AELSE precedes assembly for the converse case, and an .AENDI marks the end of the condition.

You may nest conditionals up to a depth of 100; GASP rejects nesting beyond that, because it may indicate a bug in your macro structure.

Conditionals are primarily useful inside macro definitions, where you often need different effects depending on argument values. See section Defining your own directives, for details about defining macros.

.AIF expra cmp exprb

.AIF "stra" cmp "strb"

The governing condition goes on the same line as the .AIF preprocessor command. You may compare either two strings, or two expressions. When you compare strings, only two conditional cmp comparison operators are available: `EQ' (true if stra and strb are identical), and `NE' (the opposite). When you compare two expressions, both expressions must be absolute (see section Arithmetic expressions in GASP). You can use these cmp comparison operators with expressions:

EQ

Are expra and exprb equal? (For strings, are stra and strb identical?)

NE

Are expra and exprb different? (For strings, are stra and strb different?

LT

Is expra less than exprb? (Not allowed for strings.)

LE

Is expra less than or equal to exprb? (Not allowed for strings.)

GT

Is expra greater than exprb? (Not allowed for strings.)

GE

Is expra greater than or equal to exprb? (Not allowed for strings.)

.AELSE

Marks the start of assembly code to be included if the condition fails. Optional, and only allowed within a conditional (between .AIF and .AENDI).

.AENDI

Marks the end of a conditional assembly.