The Art of Assembly Language, 2nd Edition

4.8 HLA Strings

As the previous section notes, HLA strings consist of four components: a maximum length, a current string length, character data, and a zero-terminating byte. However, HLA never requires you to create string data by manually emitting these components yourself. HLA is smart enough to automatically construct this data for you whenever it sees a string literal constant. So if you use a string constant like the following, understand that somewhere HLA is creating the four-component string in memory for you:

stdout.put( "This gets converted to a four-component string by HLA" );

HLA doesn't actually work directly with the string data described in the previous section. Instead, when HLA sees a string object, it always works with a pointer ...