Chapter 9 Reading MIPS Assembly Language

This chapter aims to help you read MIPS assembly code—specifically, that written for the MIPS version of the GNU as assembly program, since this is by far the most widely used assembler for MIPS these days.

Since this is just an introduction, we’ll be working here with common 32-bit MIPS instructions that have been part of the ISA for many years, dating all the way back to MIPS I and MIPS II.

This chapter won’t teach you how to write assembly code—that could easily fill another book, all by itself. The vast majority of readers will likely do all their programming in C, and will only occasionally run into an existing assembly file that they need to understand and perhaps modify in a small way; if your ...

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