CS232 Lecture Notes 11.
Assembly Language Fall 2021
Assembly Languages
What is an Assembly Language?
- The development of assembly language was a major milestone in the evolution of computer
technology. First step to the high-level language.
High-level language program (C, Java, Python) →
Compiler →
Binary machine language program (1111100001000000)
Assembly language program (LOAD 8 RA) →
Assembler →
Binary machine language program (1111100001000000)
- Binary programs (machine code) are tedious and very error-prone process.
- Assembly languages provide a user-friendly way to program.
- A sample assembly program: sum the first ten non-zero odd numbers
# set up
MOVE 1 RA
MOVE 0 RB
MOVE 2 RC
MOVE 10 RD
# loop
loop:
ADD RA RB RB
ADD RA RC RA
ADD -1 RD RD
BRZ breakout
BRA loop
breakout: #RB contains the sum
OPORT RB
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CS232 Lecture Notes 11. Assembly Language Fall 2021
- Assembly program:
• use symbolic name of each instruction
• use symbolic address (label)
• assembly language is hardware dependent, with a different assembly language for each
type of processor. (reference to specific registers, opcodes supported by the processor, bit
length of registers and operand of machine languages)
• Four elements of a statement in a typical assembly language
• The first element is the symbolic address; some lines have no symbolic address, implying
that the address of that line is one more than the address of the previous line; If the
operand(s) is(are) for memory-referencing instruction, it contains the symbolic address.
- Why use label?
• make a program location easier to find and remember
• instructions can easily be moved to correct the program. The assembler will
automatically change the address in all instructions that use the label when the program is
reassembled.
• programmers do not have to calculate relative or absolute memory address, but just
uses labels as needed.
Two-Pass Assembler
- The two-pass assembler parses the input file containing the assembly program twice. Before
parse the assembly program, the first step is to tokenize the program.
• During the tokenization, the whitespace and comments in the program are discarded.
• The outcome of tokenization is a list of lists. Each sublist contains the elements on a line of
code. For example, [[‘move’, ‘1’, ‘RA’], [‘move’, ‘0’, ‘RB’], …] .
- First pass is to construct a symbol table that contains a list of all labels and their associated
line number (address).
• The labels are usually used for loop.
• Examine the assembly program line by line (aka the list of lists after tokenization),
determine the length of the corresponding assembly program, and therefore determine the
line number for the labels.
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CS232 Lecture Notes 11. Assembly Language Fall 2021
• The outcome of the first pass is a symbol table that associate the line number with each
label.
- Second pass read the program (the list of lists) again from the beginning. Each instruction is
translated into the appropriate binary machine code. The translation includes:
• Translate the mnemonic (opcode) into binary
• Use the opcode to determine the format of instruction and length of the various fields in the
instruction
• Translate each operand name into appropriate register or memory code.
• Translate each immediate value into binary string
• Translate any references to labels into the appropriate line number using the symbol table
generated by the first pass.
