Art of Assembly Language, 1st Edition

3.7. 3.7 Type Coercion

Although HLA is fairly loose when it comes to type checking, HLA does ensure that you specify appropriate operand sizes to an instruction. For example, consider the following (incorrect) program:

program hasErrors;
static
     i8:     int8;
     i16:    int16;
     i32:    int32;
begin hasErrors;

     mov( i8, eax );
     mov( i16, al );
     mov( i32, ax );

end hasErrors;

HLA will generate errors for these three mov instructions. This is because the operand sizes are incompatible. The first instruction attempts to move a byte into EAX, the second instruction attempts to move a word into AL and the third instruction attempts to move a double word into AX. The mov instruction, of course, requires both operands to be the same size.

While this is a good feature in ...