Finally on the topic of FIELDs, there is one alternative form of the statement that we must discuss. We observed that every field must have a unique name. But suppose you have a field that appears repeatedly in different threads of your decoder. If the meaning of the field is identical and you want its value displayed uniformly in all cases, then you can define a FIELD for it once and then reference that repeatedly using the form:
FIELD field_name ;
The semi-colon tells the analyzer to look up a FIELD defined elsewhere with the given name and use that. The full definition of the field may be placed in any suitable position in the decoder. The full definition need not even be inline. (That is it can be placed somewhere where control would never reach - that is, after the END_MAIN_PATH statement and not within the target of a BRANCH.)