TABLE OF CONTENTS This chapter introduces the basics of the MIPS assembly language. Assembly language statements can either instruct the processor to perform a task, or direct the assembler during the assembly process. The latter statements are called assembler directives. We start this chapter with a discussion of the format and types of assembly language statements.
Assemblers provide several directives to reserve storage space for variables. SPIM also provides several I/O system calls to facilitate input and output of basic data types including integers, strings, and floating-point numbers. These details are presented in this chapter. The instruction set can be divided into several groups of instructions (arithmetic, logical, shift, and so on). We describe the data movement, load, and store instructions in detail. To help us write useful assembly language programs, we give an overview of some of the MIPS instructions belonging to the other groups. Later chapters discuss these instruction groups more fully.
Toward the end of the chapter, we provide several assembly language program examples. In each chapter, we introduce a simple program as our first program. Then we give several examples in the "Illustrative Examples" section. Starting with this chapter, we follow this format. The chapter concludes with a summary.
In the previous chapters we have discussed the MIPS architecture and SPIM simulator details. In the remainder of the book, we concentrate on the assembly language program structure and related details to write and execute the MIPS assembly language programs.
Assembly language programs consist of processor instructions, instructions...
