Learn to Program with Assembly: Foundational Learning for New Programmers

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to APress Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2021

J. BartlettLearn to Program with Assemblyhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4842-7437-8_5

5. Comparison, Branching, and Looping

Jonathan Bartlett¹  

(1)

Tulsa, OK, USA

 

In this chapter, we are going to look at how the computer makes comparisons and decisions.

5.1 The %rip Register and the jmp Instruction

In Chapter 4, we learned about the general-purpose registers. These registers are general purpose because they can be used for most arithmetic instructions. However, there are a few registers which are not usable in this way, but have a specific function that is maintained by the CPU itself. These are the special-purpose registers .

The first register I want to talk ...