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Most assemblers treat '<' and '>' as byte-select operators. Merlin 32 treats them as shift operators, making '<' effectively a no-op. A mask is applied based on the length implied by the opcode or pseudo-op, e.g. "DFB <FOO" will mask off the high bits. This is problematic for instructions like "LDA <FOO", where the choice between absolute and DP addressing depends on the value of "<FOO". If FOO is >= $100, the lack of masking will cause it be treated as absolute. There is currently no other mechanism to force the use of a direct-page opcode. The only recourse is to append "&$ff" to the operand, so the assembler knows that it can be handled as a DP op. The code generator has been updated to add "&$ff" where needed, based on the label's value. Unfortunately the assembler doesn't accept this for certain specific addressing modes; this appears to be a bug. The relevant test cases (2003x-labels-and-symbols) have been updated to exercise these situations. The current test projects side-step the failing assembler behavior by using a DP label instead. These should be changed to correctly exercise the full behavior, with the code generator outputting the instructions as raw hex values to work around bugs. There are some deliberately broken things (like a duplicate label) in the 20030 case that were copied into the 20032 case when it was created. For ease of editing these have been removed from 20032. (issue #170)