gas: undefined symbol in immediate operand

[Nick Clifton]

Hi Jeremy,

> I'm finding that if I accidentally enter an undefined symbol name as an
> *immediate* operand, then as will accept it without any warning. I've tried
> this on binutils 2.14 and 2.17 for ARM and PowerPC.

Are you sure about this ?  I just tried an arm-eabi toolchain built from 
the 2.17 sources and using your test case:

>   .equ    Moo,   0x42 
>    orr    r0,r0,#moo

I received this error message:

   jim.s: Assembler messages:
   jim.s:5: Error: undefined symbol moo used as an immediate value

> Note the typo in the symbol name. The assembler accepts it and adds an
> undefined symbol "moo" to the object file, but the linker will not flag it
> as undefined, which I presume is because there is no valid reference to it.

No if the linker does behave this way then it is a bug.  Assuming that 
the assembler does pass the reference to the undefined "moo" symbol on 
to the linker, then the linker should complain about it.  The only 
reason it would not is if the reference to the symbol is in a section of 
code that is being discarded and not included in the final executable.

Can you put together a full test case to demonstrate the problem, 
including specifying which toolchain(s) you use ?

Cheers
   Nick