The programmer used the or macro instructions to access data, providing the block address and/or key.

The term derives from "macro instruction", and such expansions were originally used in generating assembly language code.

For the 7070 these are done using 7070 Autocoder declarative statements and Macro instructions.

More complex macro instructions allowed:

Stage 1 is the compilation of a sequence of assembler macro instructions describing the configuration to be installed or updated.

Assembler macro instructions can be lengthy "programs" by themselves, executed by interpretation by the assembler during assembly.

These instructions were implemented in a so-called Macro Instruction ROM within the Clipper CPU.

A DCB is coded in Assembler programs using the DCB macro instruction (which expands into a large number of "define constant" instructions).

It had no support for macro instructions or extended mnemonics (such as BH in place of BC 2 to branch if condition code 2 indicates a high compare).

It also hides the skip instructions by providing three operand branch macro instructions such as "" (compare a with b and jump to dest if they are not equal).

A Macro instruction is a line of computer program coding that results in one or more lines of program coding in the target programming language, sets variables for use by other statements, etc..

Macro instructions were effectively a middle step between assembly language programming and the high-level programming languages that followed, such as FORTRAN and COBOL.

Most assembly languages will have a macro instruction or an interrupt address available for the particular system to intercept events such as illegal op codes, program check, data errors, overflow, divide by zero, and other such.

Later in the 1950s, assembly language programming, which had evolved to include the use of macro instructions, was followed by the development of Third-generation programming language (3GL), such as Fortran, Lisp (programming language), and COBOL.

Dynamic linking from Assembler language programs in IBM OS/360 and its successors is done typically using a LINK macro instruction containing a Supervisor Call instruction that activates the operating system routines that makes the library module to be linked available to the program.

In older operating systems such as those used on IBM mainframes, full operating system functionality was only available to assembler language programs, not to high level language programs (unless assembly language subroutines were used, of course), as the standard macro instructions did not always have counterparts in routines available to high-level languages.