What is an assembler mnemonic?
A mnemonic is an abbreviation for a machine code statement. During the translation phase, each mnemonic is translated to an equivalent machine code instruction. MOV AX, 0ffh is translated to the binary bit patterns 10111000 (this means MOV AX) 11111111 (this is ff hexadecimal) 00000000 (this is 0) What are assembler pseudo-ops? Assemblers also provide keywords called pseudo-ops. These keywords provide directions (hence they are also called assembler directives) to the assembler. Pseudo-ops do not generate machine instructions. The following pseudo-op DB ‘ab’ allocates and initializes a byte of storage for each character of the string, thus two bytes will be allocated, one initialized to the character ‘a’ whilst the other byte would be initialized to the character ‘b’. What type of code does an assembler generate? The assembler does not normally generate executable code. An assembler produces an object code file that must be further processed (linked) in order to generate a file that ca
