In at least the ADT assembler and gas a few years back, the assembler provided syntactic sugar: ldr r0,=0x123456578 assembles to ldr r0,pc+xxx ..

In at least the ADT assembler and gas a few years back, the assembler provided syntactic sugar: ldr r0,=0x123456578 assembles to ldr r0,pc+xxx ... and then somewhere later ... .word 0x12345678 The assembler had some default places it would put constant pools (end of a module?), or you could explicitly tell it to generate a constant pool if the default place would be outside the limit of the pc-relative addressing mode.