
Operations
Two sorts of operations are possible in assembly language.The first sort maps directly to machine lan-
guage instructions (opcodes) and is translated directly into machine language by the assembler.The
second sort of operation is a meta-command, a command that tells the assembler to do something,
instead of telling the computer to do something. In GNU as, the second sort of operation is always
preceded by a dot (.) character.This is good shorthand to remember. Even though we haven’t intro-
duced either command to you, you know that .int is a command directly to the assembler and popl
translates to a machine instruction. (Just so you kno ...