An expression specifies an address or numeric value. Whitespace may precede and/or follow an expression.
The result of an expression must be an absolute number, or else an offset into a particular section. If an expression is not absolute, and there is not enough information when as sees the expression to know its section, a second pass over the source program might be necessary to interpret the expression—but the second pass is currently not implemented. as aborts with an error message in this situation.
The text of the Arduino reference is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License. Code samples in the reference are released into the public domain.