If you assemble the following with fasm 1.71.39:

! db 1 ; OK
;$ db 2 ; Invalid use of symbol
;% db 3 ; Invalid use of symbol
;? db 4 ; Reserved word used as symbol
@ db 5 ; OK
^ db 6 ; OK
_ db 7 ; OK

Four of the 7 db's assemble OK, the others get the indicated errors.

However, if you assemble:

! equ 1
db !
$ equ 2
db $
% equ 3
db %
? equ 4
db ?
@ equ 5
db ?
^ equ 6
db ^
_ equ 7
db _


;! db 1 ; Reserved word used as symbol
;$ db 2 ; Reserved word used as symbol
;% db 3 ; Reserved word used as symbol
;? db 5 ; Reserved word used as symbol
;@ db 6 ; Reserved word used as symbol
;^ db 6 ; Reserved word used as symbol
;_ db 7 ; Reserved word used as symbol

The equ's all assemble OK, but all the db's get error messages, two different than in the first case.

The reason the equ's are OK is the preprocessor's tokenize code accepts them as valid symbols, but why does the assembler act differently in the two cases? Whatever characters like % and @ are, they are certainly not reserved words. I would expect the "invalid use of symbol" error instead.

The preprocessor does the symbol substitution first, then the assembler sees the substituted line. So you are trying to make label names from numbers which is not allowed.

True, my error regarding equ's (that was pretty stupid of me). But why is

! db 1 ; OK
^ db 2 ; OK
@ db 3 ; OK

while

% db 1 ; is an invalid use of symbol?

p.10 of the documentation states that "The symbols other than symbol characters and quoted strings can be used as names, so are also called the name symbols," which allows @ ! and ^ but what about %? It is not a "symbol character".

Since $ and ? alone have special uses, I understand those errors, but perhaps the documentation should be updated to make that clear when discussing names, especially as ?x is an OK name, as is x$.

If % has a special use, what is it?

Some symbols are used for numeric expressions - some for other purposes.

$1000 = 0x1000 = 1000h = 4096 ($=hex value)
%10001111 = 10001111b = 8fh (%=binary value)
123o = 1010011b = 0x53 (o=octal value)

% has another meaning as repeat counter.
See section 1.2.4 numerical expressions in the manual for details.

The following chars are symbol characters and have a special meaning and can be found in the TABLES.INC of the FASM source:

gmg1812

What the documentation isn't very good about is using the word symbol for what should actually be called token. Still the documentation defines what a symbol is.

It should be clear however that reserved symbols cannot become names. dword is a symbol, but not a symbol character and not a quoted string. Still it cannot become a name of an assembly time constant/variable, cause it's reserved by the assembler for other uses. The same is true for instance for numbers (note the difference between $? and ?$). And for the symbols ?, $ and % as well. x$ is a symbol and it's not reserved, hence it can be used as a name.

The above mentioned reserved symbols aren't reserved for the preprocessor and can therefore become names of preprocessor constants or macros. But the same way the reserved symbol include cannot become a name ( macro include {} fails). On the other hand it can become an assembly time constant name, cause it's not reserved by the assembler:

In other news, I just found out that FASM treats the hex number prefix 0x, alone, as zero.