Art of Assembly Language, 1st Edition

4.35. 4.35 Pointers to Records

During execution, your program may refer to structure objects directly or indirectly using a pointer. When you use a pointer to access fields of a structure, you must load one of the 80×86's 32-bit registers with the address of the desired record. Suppose you have the following variable declarations (assuming the Object8 structure from an earlier section):

static
     Cube:        Object8;
     CubePtr:   pointer to Object8 := &Cube;

CubePtr contains the address of (i.e., it is a pointer to) the Cube object. To access the Color field of the Cube object, you could use an instruction like "mov( Cube.Color, eax );". When accessing a field via a pointer you need to load the address of the object into a 32-bit register such as EBX. The instruction ...