I am a beginner to assembly and I don't know what all the db, dw, dd, things mean. I have tried to write this little script that does 1+1, stores it in a variable and then displays the result. Here is my code so far:
.386
.model flat, stdcall
option casemap :none
include \masm32\include\windows.inc
include \masm32\include\kernel32.inc
include \masm32\include\masm32.inc
includelib \masm32\lib\kernel32.lib
includelib \masm32\lib\masm32.lib
.data
num db ? ; set variable . Here is where I don't know what data type to use.
.code
start:
mov eax, 1 ; add 1 to eax register
mov ebx, 1 ; add 1 to ebx register
add eax, ebx ; add registers eax and ebx
push eax ; push eax into the stack
pop num ; pop eax into the variable num (when I tried it, it gave me an error, i think thats because of the data type)
invoke StdOut, addr num ; display num on the console.
invoke ExitProcess ; exit
end start
I need to understand what the db, dw, dd things mean and how they affect variable setting and combining and that sort of thing.
Thanks in advance, Progrmr
Quick review,
From x86 assembly tutorial,
The pop instruction removes the 4-byte data element from the top of the hardware-supported stack into the specified operand (i.e. register or memory location). It first moves the 4 bytes located at memory location [SP] into the specified register or memory location, and then increments SP by 4.
Your num is 1 byte. Try declaring it with DD so that it becomes 4 bytes and matches with pop semantics.
The full list is:
DB, DW, DD, DQ, DT, DDQ, and DO (used to declare initialized data in the output file.)
See: http://www.tortall.net/projects/yasm/manual/html/nasm-pseudop.html
They can be invoked in a wide range of ways: (Note: for Visual-Studio - use "h" instead of "0x" syntax - eg: not 0x55 but 55h instead):
db 0x55 ; just the byte 0x55
db 0x55,0x56,0x57 ; three bytes in succession
db 'a',0x55 ; character constants are OK
db 'hello',13,10,'$' ; so are string constants
dw 0x1234 ; 0x34 0x12
dw 'A' ; 0x41 0x00 (it's just a number)
dw 'AB' ; 0x41 0x42 (character constant)
dw 'ABC' ; 0x41 0x42 0x43 0x00 (string)
dd 0x12345678 ; 0x78 0x56 0x34 0x12
dq 0x1122334455667788 ; 0x88 0x77 0x66 0x55 0x44 0x33 0x22 0x11
ddq 0x112233445566778899aabbccddeeff00
; 0x00 0xff 0xee 0xdd 0xcc 0xbb 0xaa 0x99
; 0x88 0x77 0x66 0x55 0x44 0x33 0x22 0x11
do 0x112233445566778899aabbccddeeff00 ; same as previous
dd 1.234567e20 ; floating-point constant
dq 1.234567e20 ; double-precision float
dt 1.234567e20 ; extended-precision float
DT does not accept numeric constants as operands, and DDQ does not accept float constants as operands. Any size larger than DD does not accept strings as operands.
Source: Stackoverflow.com