Th, 9 September 2016, 00:10



A student writes:


> Dear Dr. Patt and TAs,
>
> Could you please clarify the statement in the Lab 1 Descriptor:
> "16. .FILL can take an address, signed number, or unsigned number."?
>
> Currently, I'm interpreting it to mean that .fill can take an argument of a
> number
> .fill #5
>
> and that .fill can take a valid label as an argument because ".fill can
> take an address"
> hello add r0, r2, r2
> .fill hello
>
> Is my assumption correct?
>
> Thank you.
>
> Regards,
>
> <<name withheld to protect the student who wants to be sure>>


Good question, and in fact, one that I have thought about more than
once in determining what should be allowed to the assembly language
programmer.  The objective of the course is not to turn you into a
super assembler writer for sophisticated assembly languages.  On the
other hand, we do want to provide a minimal set of assembly language
capability.  Your question hits at one such capability.  Should the
programmer be able to write .fill hello, where hello is of cousre the
label of another instruction.  I think yes, but decided I will not
require you to provide that capability in your assembler.  That is,
none of our test cases will include instructions of the form
.fill <<label>>.  ...unless you think we are being too easy, and
should allow it.

Good luck with the assignment, and good luck with the rest of the
course.



Yale Patt