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Chapter 8. Assembler Directives

If no flags are specified, the default flags depend upon the section name. If the section name is not

recognized, the default will be for the section to have none of the above flags: it will not be allocated

in memory, nor writable, nor executable. The section will contain data.

For ELF targets, the assembler supports another type of

.section

directive for compatibility with

the Solaris assembler:

.section "name"[, flags...]

Note that the section name is quoted. There may be a sequence of comma separated flags:

#alloc

section is allocatable

#write

section is writable

#execinstr

section is executable

#tls

section is used for thread local storage

This directive replaces the current section and subsection. See the contents of the gas testsuite direc 

tory

gas/testsuite/gas/elf

for some examples of how this directive and the other section stack

directives work.

8.79.

.set symbol, expression

Set the value of

symbol

to

expression

. This changes

symbol

's value and type to conform to

expression

. If

symbol

was flagged as external, it remains flagged (Section 6.5 Symbol Attributes).

You may

.set

a symbol many times in the same assembly.

If you

.set

a global symbol, the value stored in the object file is the last value stored into it.

The syntax for

set

on the HPPA is

symbol .set expression

.

8.80.

.short expressions

.short

is normally the same as

.word

. Section 8.101

.word expressions

.

In some configurations, however,

.short

and

.word

generate numbers of different lengths; Chapter

9 Machine Dependent Features.