hard to explain this without saying insane, but we have a kind of opcode encoding adopted from the original Tiny BASIC

it looks like this:

.equ IL_JUMP, 0b00000000
.equ IL_CALL, 0b01000000
.equ IL_COMPARE, 0b10000000
.equ ML_CALL, 0b11000000

and the original code treats it like this:

NEWPRG: DB hi(INIT) | 0b11000000, lo(INIT) ;CALL INIT
NEWLNE: DB hi(NLINE) | 0b11000000, lo(NLINE) ;CALL NLINE

and anyway turns out gcc assembler won't do bitwise OR inside its directive, like this one.