A constant source of confusion for new assembly language programmers is the use of spaces as the delimeter between fields of an instruction. EASy68K is patterned after the original Motorola 68000 assembler. That assembler, as do many assemblers, uses whitespace characters as delimiters between different fields of an instruction. For example:



If whitespaces are added inside any of the fields of the instruction the assembler may interpret them as delimeters resulting in a syntax error when assembling. For example:



OR the result may be different than the programmer intended. For example:



If the code is entered with spaces:


The assembler interprets it as:


While it might seem strange to start a comment with a + symbol there is no restriction that says you can't. Other languages deal with the problem by requiring a special prefix symbol before a comment. The double forward slash // in C++ is an example.

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Prof. Kelly