Chapter 4. Syntax 27A label is a symbol immediately followed by a colon (:). Whitespace before a label or after a colonis permitted, but you may not have whitespace between a label’s symbol and its colon. Section 6.1Labels.For HPPA targets, labels need not be immediately followed by a colon, but the definition of a labelmust begin in column zero. This also implies that only one label may be defined on each line.label: .directive followed by somethinganother_label: # This is an empty statement.instruction operand_1, operand_2, ...4.6. ConstantsA constant is a number, written so that its value is known by inspection, without knowing any context.Like this:.byte 74, 0112, 092, 0x4A, 0X4a, ’J, ’\J # All the same value..ascii "Ring the bell\7" # A string constant..octa 0x123456789abcdef0123456789ABCDEF0 # A bignum..float 0f-314159265358979323846264338327\95028841971.693993751E-40 # - pi, a flonum.4.6.1. Character ConstantsThere are two kinds of character constants. A character stands for one character in one byte andits value may be used in numeric expressions. String constants (properly called string literals) arepotentially many bytes and their values may not be used in arithmetic expressions.4.6.1.1. StringsA string is written between double-quotes. It may contain double-quotes or null characters. The wayto get special characters into a string is to escape these characters: precede them with a backslash \character. For example \\ represents one backslash: the first \ is an escape which tells as to interpretthe second character literally as a backslash (which prevents as from recognizing the second \ as anescape character). The complete list of escapes follows.\bMnemonic for backspace; for ASCII this is octal code 010.\fMnemonic for FormFeed; for ASCII this is octal code 014.\nMnemonic for newline; for ASCII this is octal code 012.
