Professional Assembly Language

Chapter 5. Moving Data

One of the biggest jobs of an assembly language program is handling data objects. In every assembly language program, you will have to manage some type of data elements. This chapter discusses how assembly language programs handle data and the optimal ways to do that.

The first section shows how to define data elements for use in the assembly language program. The next section shows how to move data between registers and memory. Next, conditional move instructions are discussed, showing how to move data dependent on specific actions. After that, data exchange instructions are described, showing how to swap data between registers, and between registers and memory. Finally, the stack is discussed, including the instructions used for manipulating data on the stack.

Defining Data Elements

The GNU assembler provides many different ways to define and handle data elements in your assembly language program. It's up to you to choose the best way to deal with the data your application requires. The data and bss sections both provide methods for defining data elements. The following sections describe the methods available to define data in assembly language applications

The data section

The data section of the program is the most common place to define data elements. The data section defines specific memory locations where items are stored. These items can be referenced from the instruction codes in the program, and read and modified at will.

The data section is declared using ...