1.12 High-Level Assembly Language vs. Low-Level Assembly Language

Before concluding this chapter, it's important to remind you that none of the control statements appearing in this chapter are "real" assembly language. The 80x86 CPU does not support machine instructions like if, while, repeat, for, break, breakif, and try. Whenever HLA encounters these statements, it compiles them into a sequence of one or more true machine instructions that do the operation as the high-level statements you've used. While these statements are convenient to use, and in many cases just as efficient as the sequence of low-level machine instructions into which HLA translates them, don't lose sight of the fact that they are not true machine instructions.

The purpose ...

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