Statements

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A statement ends at a newline character (\n) or at a semicolon (;). The newline or semicolon is considered part of the preceding statement. Newlines and semicolons within character constants are an exception: they do not end statements.

It is an error to end any statement with end-of-file: the last character of any input file should be a newline. An empty statement is allowed, and may include whitespace. It is ignored.

A statement begins with zero or more labels, optionally followed by a key symbol which determines what kind of statement it is. The key symbol determines the syntax of the rest of the statement. If the symbol begins with a dot . then the statement is an assembler directive: typically valid for any computer. If the symbol begins with a letter the statement is an assembly language instruction: it assembles into a machine language instruction. A label is a symbol immediately followed by a colon (:). Whitespace before a label or after a colon is permitted, but you may not have whitespace between a label's symbol and its colon. See Labels.

label:     .directive    followed by something
another_label:           # This is an empty statement.
           instruction   operand_1, operand_2, ...