Appendix A

Assemblers, Linkers, and the SPIM Simulator

James R. Larus,    Microsoft Research, Microsoft

Fear of serious injury cannot alone justify suppression of free speech and assembly.

Louis Brandeis Whitney v. California, 1927

  • A.1 Introduction A-611
  • A.2 Assemblers A-618
  • A.3 Linkers A-626
  • A.4 Loading A-627
  • A.5 Memory Usage A-628
  • A.6 Procedure Call Convention A-630
  • A.7 Exceptions and Interrupts A-641
  • A.8 Input and Output A-646
  • A.9 SPIM A-648
  • A.10 MIPS R2000 Assembly Language A-653
  • A.11 Concluding Remarks A-689
  • A.12 Exercises A-690

A.1 Introduction

Encoding instructions as binary numbers is natural and efficient for computers. Humans, however, have a great deal of difficulty understanding and manipulating these numbers. People read and write symbols (words) ...

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