SOEN 228- Final Exam Guide - Comprehensive Notes for the exam ( 49 pages long!)

• School: Concordia University
• Department: Software Engineering
• Course: SOEN 228
• Professor: Donald Peter Davis

Document Summary

Programming in assembly language deals with hardware details of a given computer. Different hardware systems lead to different assembly language abstractions, and hence assembly languages. In this course, we use intel-based hardware systems distinguished by their family-oriented" processor architectures. The machine language compatibility facilitates portability of executable program codes across different hardware platforms of the same family. Even for a same intel-family, different assembly languages do exists. Differences of assembly languages arise when software (operating systems) platforms change, for example, from a. These differences are minor in nature but may have rather different appearances. It is important to recall that the main difference between an assembly language (assembly/translator dependent) and a machine language (hardware dependent) lies in the following: The former uses symbols to encode operations and operands, whereas the latter uses binary bits. Hence the former is for human use and the latter for hardware use. Example: (assembly language form) (machine language form) add ecx, [ebx]