At 03:59 PM 03/11/1997 -0800, you wrote:

>Now I'm really puzzled; you say that you want the registers to be
>completely local to the macro, yet you want a new pair of registers
>reserved on every invocation.  It doesn't sound as though you're
>using these macros recursively, so why is this necessary?

What you propose will generally work, but it creates global names, which I
don't like: it makes code fragments which should be independent depend on
each other (or it forces me to use akwardly long names).
The only mechanism in MPASM to control scoping (and unfortunately only
within macro's) is LOCAL, so I'd like to use what little is provided.

As for a macro which is not recursive yet might not always be able to share
it's locals with itself consider this 'inline' macro which, when entered
once with a value in w, is left twice with in w the two nibbles which were
originally in w.

; convert w to two hex values in w, high nibble first
convert_w_to_hl_hex macro
 cblock
  _file_1#v($)
 endc
 local temp = _file_1#v($)
 local do_it
 movwf temp
 call do_it
 swapf temp, f
do_it
 swapf temp, w
 andlw H'0F'
 endm

This macro can be used like

send_ab
 movlw H'AB'
 convert_w_to_hl_hex
 call send
 return

But there is no technical objection to

send_0b0b
 movlw H'BB'
 convert_w_to_hl_hex
 convert_w_to_hl_hex
 call send
 return

NB Of course "call send; return" can be optimised to "goto send".