Assembler directives supply data to the program and control the assembly process. Assembler directives enable you to do the following:

• Assemble code and data into specified sections
• Reserve space in memory for uninitialized variables
• Control the appearance of listings
• Initialize memory
• Assemble conditional blocks
• Define global variables
• Specify libraries from which the assembler can obtain macros
• Examine symbolic debugging information

This chapter is divided into two parts: the first part (Section 5.1 through Section 5.11) describes the directives according to function, and the second part (Section 5.12) is an alphabetical reference.