The Art of Assembly Language, 2nd Edition

7.12 Hybrid Control Structures in HLA

The HLA high-level language control structures have a few drawbacks: (1) they're not true assembly language instructions, (2) complex boolean expressions support only short-circuit evaluation, and (3) they often introduce inefficient coding practices into a language that most people use only when they need to write high-performance code. On the other hand, while the 80x86 low-level control structures let you write efficient code, the resulting code is very difficult to read and maintain. HLA provides a set of hybrid control structures that allow you to use pure assembly language statements to evaluate boolean expressions while using the high-level control structures to delineate the statements controlled by ...