What is symbolic language in Assembly context
Performing a Computer Organization list I came across the following Question:
Rewrite the programs written in assembly language in the previous exercise for symbolic language. Consider that the first instruction of each program is "mounted" in memory position 512 and that each instruction occupies exactly 1 position of that memory. The data is stored in memory from position 640 considering the label of the variables in alphabetical order
I found problem in solving such activity because of the 'symbolic language', which I do not know what it is in this context of OC. Searching I did not find the exact definition of symbolic language in the Assembly context, but I found this answer in Quora that indicates what are symbols in Assembly, but does not answer: what symbols represents Assembly directives, such as ADD, SUB, etc. In this case I suppose I have to write the operation number and the number of operands in binary or a representation provided by the author (right ?), turning the assembly language into something more 'abstract', similar to:
Is my interpretation correct ? If yes, in the activity nothing is reported, how would I solve this ?!?
Note: I don't want them to do the activity, I want to understand how I can do it.
1 answers
Machine language is usually accompanied by a "readable" version called symbolic or simply Assembly Language.
Symbolic because this language is not composed of binary or hexadecimal numbers. The assembly language is actually a machine-readable version of the language. It uses abbreviated words, called mnemonics, indicating the operation to be performed by the processor.
Example:
The instruction in standard machine language x86:
00000105h
Can be assigned to the mnemonic MOV (short for movement) having two registers as a parameter, R1 and R5. When the processor executes this instruction, it commands the movement of the contents from R5 to R1.
Then the instruction in machine language 00000105h can be written in symbolic language as:
MOV R1, R5