The Art of Assembly Language, 2nd Edition

6.4 Machine and Arithmetic Idioms

An idiom is an idiosyncrasy. Several arithmetic operations and 80x86 instructions have idiosyncrasies that you can take advantage of when writing assembly language code. Some people refer to the use of machine and arithmetic idioms as "tricky programming" that you should always avoid in well-written programs. While it is wise to avoid tricks just for the sake of tricks, many machine and arithmetic idioms are well known and commonly found in assembly language programs. Some of them are little more than tricks, but a good number of them are simply "tricks of the trade." This text cannot even begin to present all of the idioms in common use today; they are too numerous and the list is constantly changing. Nevertheless, ...