Expressions

Expressions in the COFF link editor command language may contain global symbols, constants, and most of the basic C language operators. (See ``Syntax diagram for input directives''.) Constants are the same as in C, with a number recognized as hexadecimal if it starts with '0x', as octal if it starts with '0', and as decimal otherwise. All numbers are treated as long integers. Symbol names may contain uppercase or lowercase letters, digits, and the underscore character (_). Symbols within an expression have the value of the address of the symbol only. ld does not do symbol table lookup to find the contents of a symbol, the dimensionality of an array, structure elements declared in a C program, and so on.

Certain names are reserved and hence unavailable as symbol or section names. This impacts your C source program. A common error is to use ifiles when your C program contains any of the reserved names (for example, length). The reserved names include:

ADDR	BLOCK	GROUP	NEXT	RANGE	SPARE
ALIGN	COMMON	INFO	NOLOAD	REGIONS	PHY
ASSIGN	COPY	LENGTH	ORIGIN	SECTIONS	TV
BIND	DSECT	MEMORY	OVERLAY	SIZEOF
addr	block	length	origin	sizeof
align	group	next	phy	spare
assign	l	o	range
bind	len	org	s

The supported operators are shown in the following table, in order of precedence from highest to lowest:

Operator Symbols

symbol
! ~ - (UNARY Minus)
/ %
+ - (BINARY Minus)
>> <<
== != > < <= >=
&
|
&&
||
= += -= = /=

The operators have the same meaning as in the C language. Operators on the same line in the table have the same precedence.