Hi Andrew (Andrew G Williams), in <970910154159_574148960@emout20.mail.aol.com>
 on Sep 10 you wrote:

> >But an assembler should be able to discriminate these two uses by checking
> >for hexdigits following the $ sign.
>
> Hex digits start at zero rather than 'A', so the assembler couldn't really
> discriminate. What about $1234?

        goto    $1234

is not a valid PC displacement such as $-1234 or $+1234.  So the ASM could
read it as 0x1234 safely.  Negative HEX values must be written as -$1234.

Typing errors are not detected, though:

        goto    $2      ; "-" key worn out