Macro parameters ignore conditionals about dasm HOT 2 OPEN

I think that is pretty much true for all macro assemblers I have ever used. Sometime, you can do a bit of "extra" stuff, such as getting at the number of parameters that were passed, or iterating over all parameters in turn, or testing if a parameter is the empty string or equal to some string or another... but that never abandons the principle that everything is just text substitution. Take this macro from a program in MACRO-11 (the main assembler for the PDP-11): .macro save things .irp x,<things> .if b x ; if blank, just decrease stack pointer, ; don't really store anything tst -(p) .iff ; "if false", meaning "else" .if idn x,#0 ; if #0, use the clr instruction ; instead of really moving anything clr -(sp) .iff mov x,-(sp) .endc .endc .endr .endm where .irp is a repeating loop, setting 'x' in turn to the values in <things>, which is a parameter to the macro. You use it for instance like save <r0,,#0,#2> which would generate code like mov r0,-(sp) tst -(sp) clr -(sp) mov #2,-(sp) which in turn saves the values in register 0, and the immediate values #1 and #2. MACRO11 even has a directive .NTYPE, which you give some string and it parses it as an operand, and sets a variable to the addressing mode it found. So you can use .if conditions in your macro; the macro is still just string manipulation, but the .NTYPE directive gives you just that extra bit of power to optimize your macro for various types of arguments.