A glimpse of ASM
It was kind of shocking last Friday when our client didn't approve our project plan. Instead of having a 4 month duration that would involve design, coding and delivery our time was cut down to 1 month(20 days to be exact). I am pretty confident though that we could beat the deadline for even such a short time. It's Saturday, this morning I was researching on how to implement a Connection pool with Tomcat and also I was reading a paper that I printed in the office about how to make your own Connection pool class. This blog entry isn't related to anything I said. I just love to tell things to people that isn't directly related to my point hehehe.
I was up tonight at about 9:00 PM. I was suppose to read about Allegro, a game programming library for C/C++ which I plan to use in my hobby project. C/C++ was also a part of my life even though my work has nothing to do with it and although I have done nothing useful with it. But out of boredom as I was searching/reviewing about C++ file organization or whatever they call it(I was researching on how to separate the .h and .c implementation) I happen to see a link to a assembly x86 tutorial. Now... I haven't touched assembly even once...
Assemly is a language that I can say... A virgin in my eyes. I haven't coded anything assembly in my life before. Yes, I have a book on it which I haven't even flipped a single page from. I am not intimidated by the fact that assembly is a low-level, powerful language that existed even the day I was born... At least it's not J2EE/JEE from which you get confused with the large array of technologies available. There is only one assembly, and yet it's hard for me to start coding in it... I wonder why...
To help me remember that things I've read, I am writing this post.
First of all, I figured that assembly uses a code structure like most language do. For example, in C you have the topmost level to declare the libraries you plan to use, followed by variables and then the main method. There's also something like that in assembly though a lot of difference may arise, if you've ever coded in your life this shouldn't be a problem.
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| .model tiny ; Tell compiler to build a tiny program model
.stack
.data
msg db "My First ASM PROGRAM!!!! WHOOOO", 13, 10, "$"
.code
START:
mov ax, seg msg ; mov the contents of seg msg into AX register
mov ds, ax ; mov the contents of AX into DS
mov dx, offset msg ; mov the offset of msg into dx
mov ah, 09 ; tell 21h interupt to print msg to screen
int 21h
mov ax, 4c00h ; Exit The Program
int 21h ; Safely
END START |
Code above was taken from
http://www.free2code.net/plugins/articles/read.php?id=154 which I think is a good intro for assembly newbies like me.
It's really a waste of time trying to explain what the program does here when someone else already did. Besides, I'm getting sleepy... If I decide to make something out of what I read today then that will be fun. I just finished downloading TASM and I also got a link for list of
interrupts, the only thing left is motivation.