See MIPS Run, 2nd Edition

Chapter 8 Complete Guide to the MIPS Instruction Set

Chapters 8 and 9 are written for the programmer who wants to understand or generate assembly code (whether in person or indirectly because you’re writing or fixing a compiler). While Chapter 9 discusses real assembly language programming, this chapter only concerns itself with assembly language instructions; broadly speaking, you can skip Chapter 9 if you only want to read disassembly listings. We begin with a simple piece of MIPS code and an overview.

8.1 A Simple Example

This is an implementation of the C library function strcmp (1), which compares two character strings and returns zero on equal, a positive value if the first string is greater (in string order) than the second, and a negative ...