Assembly Language
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Assembly language represents machine-level instructions in a symbolic and more understandable form. It provides knowledge of how a processor executes instructions and accesses data. While requiring less memory and execution time, assembly language allows hardware-specific tasks and is suitable for time-critical jobs. The processor executes programs by fetching, decoding, and executing instructions, accessing data through memory addresses. It stores multi-byte data in reverse order and uses absolute or segment addresses.
Assembly Language
- 1. Assembly Language What is Assembly Language? Each personal computer has a microprocessor that manages the computer's arithmetical, logical and control activities. Each family of processors has its own set of instructions for handling various operations like getting input from keyboard, displaying information on screen and performing various other jobs. These set of instructions are called 'machine language instructions'. Processor understands only machine language instructions which are strings of 1's and 0's. However, machine language is too obscure and complex for using in software development. So, the low-level assembly language is designed for a specific family of processors that represents various instructions in symbolic code and a more understandable form. Advantages of Assembly Language An understanding of assembly language provides knowledge of: Interface of programs with OS, processor and BIOS; Representation of data in memory and other external devices; How processor accesses and executes instruction; How instructions access and process data; How a program accesses external devices. Other advantages of using assembly language are: It requires less memory and execution time; It allows hardware-specific complex jobs in an easier way; It is suitable for time-critical jobs; It is most suitable for writing interrupt service routines and other memory resident programs. Basic Features of PC Hardware The main internal hardware of a PC consists of the processor, memory and the registers. The registers are processor components that hold data and address. To execute a program, the system copies it from the external device into the internal memory. The processor executes the program instructions. The fundamental unit of computer storage is a bit; it could be on (1) or off (0). A group of nine related bits makes a byte. Eight bits are used for data and the last one is used for parity. According to the rule of parity, number of bits that are on (1) in each byte should always be odd. So, the parity bit is used to make the number of bits in a byte odd. If the parity is even, the system assumes that there had been a parity error (though rare) which might have caused due to hardware fault or electrical disturbance.
- 2. The processor supports the following data sizes: Word: a 2-byte data item Doubleword: a 4-byte (32 bit) data item Quadword: an 8-byte (64 bit) data item Paragraph: a 16-byte (128 bit) area Kilobyte: 1024 bytes Megabyte: 1,048,576 bytes Addressing Data in Memory The process through which the processor controls the execution of instructions is referred as the fetch- decode-execute cycle or the execution cycle. It consists of three continuous steps: Fetching the instruction from memory Decoding or identifying the instruction Executing the instruction The processor may access one or more bytes of memory at a time. Let us consider a hexadecimal number 0725H. This number will require two bytes of memory. The high-order byte or most significant byte is 07 and the low-order byte is 25. The processor stores data in reverse-byte sequence, i.e., the low-order byte is stored in low memory address and high-order byte in high memory address. So if processor brings the value 0725H from register to memory, it will transfer 25 first to the lower memory address and 07 to the next memory address. x: memory address When the processor gets the numeric data from memory to register, it again reverses the bytes. There are two kinds of memory addresses: An absolute address - a direct reference of specific location. The segment address (or offset) - starting address of a memory segment with the offset value.