On Mon, 23 Sep 1996, Philip Lalone wrote:

>         Is it possible to write a MPASM macro that will print a string
> using: PRINT "This is the string"? The only way i've been able to get
> anything like this working is writing seperate code for each string I
> want to print, any theory or code would be appriciated.  I need to do this
> for serial data and a LCD, which I've written code for, so all the macro
> would need to do is call the serial/lcd routine with each character or a
> pointer to the string.

I'm not certain about the syntax, but I believe there's a built-in that
will take a string (?) and assemble a series of retlw instructions, which
suggests that you could get the macro to generate something like this:

    goto str1_end
str1:
    retlw 'T'
    retlw 'h'
    retlw 'i'
    retlw 's'
    .
    .
    .
    retlw 0
str1_end:
    movlw high(str1)
    movwf StrPtrHi
    movlw low(str1)
    call RoutineToOutputStringToWherever

Where the output routine would handle stepping the pointer and fetching
bytes until the terminating NUL was reached.  Alternately, I believe you
could make the first byte returned be a count.  In either case, the
string's (far) address is in StrPtrHi:W on entry to the output routine.

Hmmm... I may have a use for this in a project that's been simmering on
the back burner for a while.  :-)