#406 Structures with local fields

[Anonymous]

; This doesn't work... It might be that I'm doing it wrong, but the documentation doesn't specify how to do this...

struc foo
.bar: resb 1
endstruc

foobar:
istruc foo
at .bar, db 00h
iend

[nasm64developer]

As shown in your example, the structure
definition defines foo.bar whereas the
structure instantiation then references
foobar.bar, which (of course) fails.

Write "at foo.bar, db 00h" instead.

The first sentence of the last paragraph
in section 4.11.9 of the manual describes
this, though it could do a better job.

[H. Peter Anvin]

It's not clear to me that this shouldn't be fixed. It's a pretty serious violation of user expectation, one would think.

The tricky part is that it's not very clear *how* to fix it -- in particular, what is the user expectation of expressions on the right-hand side?

[Nobody/Anonymous]

If the standard 'at' macro is changed to something like the following then the structure name is optional.

%imacro at 1-2+.nolist

; Find the first character of the member label...
%defstr %$memberstring %1
%substr %$char %$memberstring 1

; ...if it is a dot, then prepend the structure name.
%ifidn %$char,'.'
%xdefine %$member_label %[%$strucname]%1
%else
%define %$member_label %1
%endif

times (%$member_label-%$strucname)-($-%$strucstart) db 0
%2
%endmacro

- Anonymous Coward