Assembling Your Program

Before you attempt to debug your programs, you must first assemble them. Here’s

the command for invoking the assembler when preparing a program for debugging:

dsk5a [ filename(s)][–options]

dsk5a is the command that invokes the assembler.

filenames are one or more assembly language source files. Filenames are

not case sensitive.

–options affect the way the assembler processes input files.

Options and filenames can be specified in any order on the command line.

Summary of Assembler Options

Option Description

–k Generates an output file regardless of errors or warnings

–l Generates a temporary file containing a list of any unresolved

opcodes or symbols

asm Allows you to define assembler statements from the command line

Generating an output file (–k option)

By default, the DSK deletes a file corrupted with errors. For debugging

purposes, the –k option tells the DSK assembler to generate an output file

despite any errors or warnings found.

Creating a temporary object file (–l option)

The DSK assembler generates an intermediate listing file containing all un-resolved

opcodes when you use the –l (lowercase L) option. For example, if

you want to assemble a file named test.asm and create a listing file, enter:

dsk5a test –l

The above example creates the file test.lst from the file test.asm . Any

unresolved symbols are resolved after the DSK assembler has read the entire

assembly file.

Using the DSK Assembler Directives

Table 5–1 summarizes the assembler directives. Note that all source

statements that contain a directive may have a label and a comment . To

improve readability, they are not shown as part of the directive syntax.

Table 5–1. Assembler Directives Summary

(a) Directives that define sections