Itanium® Architecture for Programmers: Understanding 64-Bit Processors and EPIC Principles

3.4. Assembler Statement Types

Learning a new language—whether a human language or a computer language—involves, at the outset, a large amount of new terminology. When we first introduced the SQUARES program (Figure 1-3), we left many details unexplained. Although we will now proceed somewhat more systematically, you still need to have some patience when we introduce several new concepts all at once and then return to discuss them individually at a later time.

We can think of each line in an assembly language program as being a statement that may be imperative, declarative, or controlling:

• Imperative statements represent machine instructions in symbolic form. For example, add means an addition instruction and mov denotes a data transfer instruction ...