Art of Assembly Language, 1st Edition

4.41. 4.41 Dynamic Arrays in Assembly Language

One problem with arrays as this chapter describes them is that their size is static. That is, the number of elements in all of the examples was chosen when writing the program; it was not selected while the program runs (i.e., dynamically). Alas, sometimes you simply don't know how big an array needs to be when you're writing the program; you can only determine the size of the array while the program is running. This section describes how to allocate storage for arrays dynamically so you can set their size at runtime.

Allocating storage for a single dimension array, and accessing elements of that array, is a nearly trivial task at runtime. All you need to do is call the HLA Standard Library malloc ...