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Objectives and Perspective of Assembly Language

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Muhammad Obaid
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2K views

Objectives and Perspective of Assembly Language

Uploaded by

Muhammad Obaid
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as PPTX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Assembly Language

Here’s what a program-fragment looks like:

10100001 10111100 10010011 00000100


00001000 00000011 00000101 11000000
10010011 00000100 00001000 10100011
11000000 10010100 00000100 00001000

It means: z = x + y;
 Machine language
 Native to a processor: executed directly by hardware
 Instructions consist of binary code: 1s and 0s
 Assembly language
 A programming language that uses symbolic names to represent
operations, registers and memory locations.
 Slightly higher-level language
 Readability of instructions is better than machine language
 One-to-one correspondence with machine language instructions
 Assemblers translate assembly to machine code
 Compilers translate high-level programs to machine code
 Either directly, or
 Indirectly via an assembler
 Software tools are needed for editing, assembling, linking,
and debugging assembly language programs
 An assembler is a program that converts source-code
programs written in assembly language into object files in
machine language
 Popular assemblers have emerged over the years for the
Intel family of processors. These include …
 TASM (Turbo Assembler from Borland)
 NASM (Netwide Assembler for both Windows and Linux), and
 GNU assembler distributed by the free software foundation
 In assembly language, mnemonics are used
to specify an opcode that represents a
complete and operational machine language
instruction. This is later translated by the
assembler to generate the object code. For
example, the mnemonic MOV is used in
assembly language for copying and moving
data between registers and memory
locations.
 Each command of a program is called an instruction
(it instructs the computer what to do).
 Computers only deal with binary data, hence the
instructions must be in binary format (0s and 1s) .
 The set of all instructions (in binary form) makes up the
computer's machine language. This is also referred to as
the instruction set.
 Machine language instructions usually are made up of
several fields. Each field specifies different information
for the computer. The major two fields are:
 Opcode field which stands for operation code and it
specifies the particular operation that is to be performed.
 Each operation has its unique opcode.
 Operands fields which specify where to get the source
and destination operands for the operation specified by
the opcode.
 The source/destination of operands can be a constant,
the memory or one of the general-purpose registers.
 Built from two pieces
Add R1, R3, 3

Opcode Operands
What to do Where to
with the data get data and
(ALU put the
operation) results
 Arithmetic, logical
◦ add, sub, mult
◦ and, or
◦ Cmp
 Memory load/store
◦ ld, st
 Control transfer
◦ jmp
◦ bne
 Complex
◦ movs
 Each operand taken from a particular
addressing mode:
 Examples:

Register add r1, r2, r3


Immediate add r1, r2, 10
Indirect mov r1, (r2)
Offset mov r1,
PC 10(r3) beq
Relative 100
 Reflect processor data pathways
 ASCII, American Standard Code for
Information Interchange, is a scheme used for
assigning numeric values to punctuation
marks, spaces, numbers and other
characters. ASCII uses 7 bits to represent
characters. The values 000 0000 through 111
1111 or 00 through 7F are used giving ASCII
the ability to represent 128 different
characters. An extended version of ASCII
assigns characters from 80 through FF.
 Accessibility to system hardware
 Assembly Language is useful for implementing system software
 Also useful for small embedded system applications
 Space and Time efficiency
 Understanding sources of program inefficiency
 Tuning program performance
 Writing compact code
 Writing assembly programs gives the computer designer the
needed deep understanding of the instruction set and how to
design one
 To be able to write compilers for HLLs, we need to be expert with
the machine language. Assembly programming provides this
experience
1. Shows how program interfaces with the
processor, operating system, and BIOS.
2. Shows how data is represented and stored
in memory and on external devices.
3. Clarifies how processor accesses and
executes instructions and how instructions
access and process data.
4. Clarifies how a program accesses external
devices.
 1. Assembly Language is used when speed and
reliability are the overriding factor like small
footprint real-time operating systems.
2.By using assembly language, programmers can
maximize on speed to a level. It is easy to write
than machine code programs.
3.It allows the programmer access to registers or
instructions that are not usually provided by a
High-level language.
4.The main Application of Assembly Language is
for direct hardware manipulation i.e. device
drivers.
5.Assembly language also directly correlates
which machine instructions; the only way to get
closer to the machine is to write in binary or hex
code.

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