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The Art of Assembly Language, 2nd Edition
book

The Art of Assembly Language, 2nd Edition

by Randall Hyde
March 2010
Beginner content levelBeginner
760 pages
18h 51m
English
No Starch Press
Content preview from The Art of Assembly Language, 2nd Edition

2.13 Binary-Coded Decimal Representation

Although the integer and floating-point formats cover most of the numeric needs of an average program, there are some special cases where other numeric representations are convenient. In this section we'll discuss the binary-coded decimal format because the 80x86 CPU provides a small amount of hardware support for this data representation.

BCD values are a sequence of nibbles, with each nibble representing a value in the range 0..9. Of course you can represent values in the range 0..15 using a nibble; the BCD format, however, uses only 10 of the possible 16 different values for each nibble.

Each nibble in a BCD value represents a single decimal digit. Therefore, with a single byte (i.e., two digits) we can ...

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Publisher Resources

ISBN: 9781593272074Errata Page