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:

Table 4-1 Operator Symbols

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