Here's the first beta release with my implementation of that feature with the ` character as conversion operator. I've also allowed # operator to be used to concatenate quoted strings only, so this version is able to correctly process such macro for object files:

It works great with my sources. Thank you.

Please yourself, but I still think ` isn't good choice. It's good for advanced user, but as scientica wrote, newbies will have troubles with it. It simply decrease readability of the source. Not everyone using syntax highlighing. Please, think again.

Regards.

Yeah, ` is way, way too similar to '.

What do the fasm usesr from those contries that uses a non latin charset (e.g. China, Russia) say? is it easy to differe betwen ' and '? Are they accessible at all on the keyboard? (I just thought of this, after seeing a chinese keyboard layout)

With FasmW, it shouldn't be any problem since the AsmEdit-control highlights ' and " as strings, while ` is highlighted as a symbol.... IMHO: we should go for `... But, that's what I mean...

Good work Tomasz (and John)!

So long!
Tommy

Yes scientica is right. IMHO it is confusing and difficult to read.

What about ~ or § or > (^ is good too)?

It is one of the base set of ASCII (please check in the characters table in my tutorial preliminary ), so there can't be any trouble with it.

There is only one small problem with this feature - it is not as clear and logical in use as concatenation operator, and this also be a trouble for newbies. That is, it has to be explained clearly in documentation, that only the single word following the ` operator is converted into type of quoted string. For example, when we define such macro:

and then use it like here:

it will end as:

and it may be a bit confusing.

and what about ::

In my keyboard layout, It's impossible to type that char (grasp accen '~' has been used to switch the keyboard layout from Thai to English and it's hard to change and It share with that char).

Hmm... What about:
test (2+2) ? will it be:
db '?'

(Haven't been able to try the beta yet)

How about this:
After replacing symbols with their values replace all ` with '
then you could code things like:

Without problems

At the stage when macros are preprocessed there already are no more characters like ' - quoted strings and simple words are two types of "byte streams" there, and that operator simply converts one into another.