Expressions

Ophis permits a reasonably rich set of arithmetic operations to be done at assemble time. So far, all of our arguments and values have either been constants or label names. In this chapter, we will modify the print macro so that it calls a subroutine to do the actual printing. This will shrink the final code size a fair bit.

Here's our printing routine. It's fairly straightforward.

; PRINTSTR routine.  Accumulator stores the low byte of the address,
; X register stores the high byte.  Destroys the values of $10 and
; $11.

.scope
printstr:
        sta $10
        stx $11
        ldy #$00
_lp:    lda ($10), y
        beq _done
        jsr chrout
        iny
        bne _lp
_done:  rts
.scend

However, now we are faced with the problem of what to do with the print macro. We need to take a 16-bit value and store it in two 8-bit registers. We can use the < and > operators to take the low or high byte of a word, respectively. The print macro becomes:

.macro print
        lda #<_1
        ldx #>_1
        jsr printstr
.macend

Also, since BASIC uses the locations $10 and $11, we should really cache them at the start of the program and restore them at the end:

.data
.org $C000
.space cache 2
.text

        ; Save the zero page locations that printstr uses.
        lda $10
        sta cache
        lda $11
        sta cache+1

        ; ... main program goes here ...

        ; Restore the zero page values printstr uses.
        lda cache
        sta $10
        lda cache+1
        sta $11

Note that we only have to name cache once, but can use addition to refer to any offset from it.

Ophis supports following operations, with the following precedence levels (higher entries bind more tightly):

Note that brackets, not parentheses, are used to group arithmetic operations. This is because parentheses are used for the indirect addressing modes, and it makes parsing much easier.

The code for this version of the code is in tutor6.oph.