An assembler incapable of supporting structures of the type supported in the "C" language receives and processes an assembly language program that contains one or more definitions of structures, structure instantiations and structure uses. Specifically, structure definitions are presented in the form of macro definitions. Moreover, a name to be used to identify the structure is passed as a parameter to the macro being defined (also called "structure-definition macro"). Furthermore, one or more members of a structure are presented in the form of arguments to a respective number of one or more macros that are invoked between the beginning and end of the structure-definition macro. During instantiation, variable names are created for each member of the structure, and these names are bound to appropriate addresses of resources. Thereafter, these variable names are used in the assembly language program to access data mapped to the member name.