Memory Addressing: Direct and Indirect
6 min
You may have noticed the use of dollar signs and parentheses in our previous code. These are some
MIPS language conventions used to denote direct and indirect memory referencing.
Let’s assume that Register 5 has the value 11010001112 (83910) stored in it. Let us also assume that there
is a piece of memory with the address 839 that contains the value 10001110001112 (455110).
When we directly reference something in memory, we are telling the assembler that we want the value
that is stored in that exact location.
Let’s take a look at an Assembly code example that adds the value of Register 5 to Register 5 and saves
the result in Register 6:
ADD $5, $5, $6
to Clipboard
Register 6 now contains 110100011102 (167810). 839 + 839 = 1678
When we indirectly reference memory, we are telling the assembler that we don’t want to use the value
of what is stored in the reference, we want to use that value as the address to another memory location
and use the value stored there.
LW $4, ($5)
ADD $5, $4, $6
to Clipboard
In MIPS we can only perform operations on registers so the first step is to retrieve the value from
memory with the Load Word statement and save it into Register 4. When we use the parentheses
around Register 5, we are now telling the assembler to go and find the data that is stored in the memory
address 839 which was 10001110001112 (455110).
At the conclusion of our ADD statement, Register 6 now contains the value 10101000011102 (539010).
4551 + 839 = 5390.
Instructions
1. Checkpoint 1 Passed
1.
Create a new variable, answer_1, and set it equal to the type of memory addressing that uses the value
stored in one location as the address to reference another value.
When creating your answer, make sure the text is in all lowercase.
Hint
When we reference memory in this way, we are telling the CPU to go to the location contained within
the reference and load a value from there.
2. Checkpoint 2 Passed
2.
Create another variable, answer_2, and set it equal to the symbols that surround an indirect memory
reference in MIPS.
Hint
In most higher-level languages these symbols are reserved to pass in arguments to a function, in a
roundabout sort of way, you can associate this concept to Assembly as well. We are passing a reference
to a value stored in another location.
memory_addressing.py
# Your code below here:
answer_1 = 'indirect'
answer_2 = '()'
