Assembly language

Assembly language
An easier-to-use symbolic representation of machine
language
Uses mnemonics for operations
 ADD, MUL, MOV, CMP, PUSH, etc.
Also includes calls to operating system service routines
An assembly language program is translated into
machine language by a program called an
assembler
Basic components in assembly Language:
Instruction, Directive, Label, and Comment

1
 Example of Assembly Language Program

;NUMOFF.ASM: Turn NUM-LOCK indicator off. Comments

.MODEL SMALL
.STACK
.CODE Assembly directive

.STARTUP
MOV AX,40H ;set AX to 0040H
D1: MOV DS,AX ;load data segment with 0040H
Instructions
MOV SI,17H ;load SI with 0017H
AND BYTE PTR [SI],0DFH ;clear NUM-LOCK bit
.EXIT
END Assembly directive

Label

7-2
 Microsoft MASM and Debug
 Microsoft MASM and Link Programs

Syntax check;
ML numoff.asm Translate assembly instructions into machine codes

 Microsoft Debug Program

C:\> debug
-a
0BDF:0100 MOV AX, 40
0BDF:0103
-t
AX = 0040 BX = 0000 CX = 0000 DX = 0000 SP = …………….
…………………………………………..
-q

7-3
The 8088 instruction set
There are various groups of instructions ,which I
studied in my previous LABS:
Data transfer
Arithmetic
Logical
Shift and rotate
Test and bit flag
Looping
Repetitive string operations
Jump and call

4
 Overview of Assembly Language

 Advantages:

 Faster as compared to programs written using high-level languages

 Efficient memory usage
 Control down to bit level

 Disadvantages:
´ Need to know detail hardware implementation
´ Not portable
´ Slow to development and difficult to debug

 Basic components in assembly Language:

Instruction, Directive, Label, and Comment

7-5
Debugging
There are four debugging routines named
dump regs,
dump mem,
dump stack,
and dump math;
Assembly language
An assembly language program is stored as text
(just as a higher level language program). Each
assembly instruction represents exactly one
machine instruction.
The general form of an assembly instruction is:
mnemonic operand(s)
An assembler is a program that reads a text file with
assembly instructions and converts the assembly
into machine code. Compilers are programs that do
similar conversions for high-level programming
languages.