Mastering Assembly Programming

Exponentiation

We make use of exponentiation in our sin_taylor_series procedure, an algorithm which is not as trivial as it may seem when it comes to real numbers used as exponents; however, we are quite lucky because the Taylor series only uses natural numbers for that purpose, but, it is worth mentioning that, should we need larger exponents, the algorithm would have been too slow. Therefore, our implementation of an exponentiation algorithm is as basic as it gets--we simply multiply the parameter in XMM0 by itself ECX-1 times. ECX is decremented once because there is no need to calculate x¹:

;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; Trivial exponentiation function; Parameters are:; Values to exponentiate in XMM0; Exponent ...