An Introduction to CSCI 250

The course description of this course is given as follows:
Introduction to machine language and assembly language programming. Concepts of assembly language and the machine representation of instructions and data of a modern digital computer are presented. Requires students to practice assembly language programming techniques on ARM and Intel x86 architectures.
where assembly language is defined as
Assembly language is a symbolic representation of the machine language, which consists entirely of numbers, of a specific processor.
A processor only understands machine code. An assembly language program has to be converted to machine code by an assembler before a processor executes it. An example of an assembly language program and its corresponding machine code is given below:


Address
Label
Instruction (AT&T Syntax)
Object Code
   
  .begin		  
      .org 2048  
    a_start   .equ 3000  
  2048     ld length,%  
  2064     be done   00000010 10000000 00000000 00000110
  2068     addcc %r1,-4,%r1   10000010 10000000 01111111 11111100
  2072     addcc %r1,%r2,%r4   10001000 10000000 01000000 00000010
  2076     ld %r4,%r5   11001010 00000001 00000000 00000000
  2080     ba loop   00010000 10111111 11111111 11111011
  2084     addcc %r3,%r5,%r3   10000110 10000000 11000000 00000101
  2088   done:   jmpl %r15+4,%r0   10000001 11000011 11100000 00000100
  2092   length:   20   00000000 00000000 00000000 00010100
  2096   address:   a_start   00000000 00000000 00001011 10111000
      .org a_start  
  3000

   a:

    




      Sad after the funeral of a friend,    
      my wife and I ducked into a Chinese restaurant for a pick-me-up.    
      The feel-good session ended when I read the fortune cookie:    
      “You will soon be reunited with a good friend.”