Bring your own source

Every Z80 assembler has its own dialect — its own way of spelling a hex number, its own macro syntax, its own quirks. zenas doesn't force you to rewrite existing source from scratch to bring it across.

Conventions zenas already speaks

• Multiple hex and decimal notations — 0x, &, an h suffix, and pasmo's # prefix are all recognised, alongside pasmo-style bulk radix input for data (.DB 0x 60 0D F0 0D) for entering binary blobs without converting every byte by hand.
• Bare, unquoted INCLUDE filenames (INCLUDE somefile.asm), the pasmo style, alongside the standard quoted form.
• OPT ZXNEXT, the same inline directive SNasm and other Z80N-aware assemblers use to enable Next instructions from within a source file.
• --zxnext, sjasmplus's own flag spelling for the same thing, alongside zenas's own --next.

Coverage is growing rather than total — a handful of constructs from other dialects (scoped local labels among them) aren't there yet — but for the everyday conventions above, existing source often assembles with little or no rewriting.

Why it matters

Nobody wants to reformat years of accumulated source just to switch tools. zenas's growing dialect coverage means bringing existing programs across is often a matter of trying it, not rewriting it.