Conditional assembly language

A conditional assembly language is that part of an assembly language used to write macros.

Example

In the IBM conditional assembly language, the most important statements are:

• MACRO and MEND - used to start and finish a macro
• AIF, AGO, ANOP, AEND, AEXIT and MEXIT - used to control the generation of different assembly language statements, depending on the nature of the macro’s supplied arguments.
• SETx - used to manipulate variables within the macro.

Alternative use

The conditional assembler is not restricted to generating assembler code and was used by IBM in the 1970s onwards to generate COBOL or PL/1 statements for compiling into CICS application programs.