CODEWITHSUNDEEP
assemblymips
Coursal
Coursal

Reputation: 1387

Assembly MIPS: Printing a character five times using loops

I want to write a program using loops that prints the asterisk character '*' five times, so I wrote this:

.data
ast: .word '*'

.text
.globl main
main:
la  $a0, ast
add $t0, $zero, $zero   #counter

loop:

slti    $t1, $t0, 5
beq     $t1, $zero, exit

li  $v0, 1
syscall

addiu   $t0, $t0, 1

j loop
exit:

li  $v0, 10
syscall

but instead of printing five asterisks, it gives me this huge number: 268500992268500992268500992268500992268500992

By running step by step I see that $t0 that I use for the counter has the correct value for each loop (1 to the 2 to the 3 to the 4 to the 5). With the slti and beq lines I try to control the loops till the counter reaches the number 5.

What is it missing?

Upvotes: 1

Views: 2273

Answers (1)

samia_azim
samia_azim

Reputation: 36

There are two problems with your code. Firstly in data declarations the asterisk should be decaled as .asciiz instead of .word. The .word data type is used for integers usually as it is 32 bits long. Secondly, you have used the wrong syscall to print the aesterick. li $v0, 1 is for printing integers. The correct one to be used here is li $v0, 4.

.data
ast: .asciiz "*"

.text
.globl main
main:
la  $a0, ast
add $t0, $zero, $zero   #counter

loop:

slti    $t1, $t0, 5
beq     $t1, $zero, exit

li  $v0, 4
syscall

addiu   $t0, $t0, 1

j loop
exit:
li  $v0, 10
syscall

The above code prints 5 *. Hope this helped. Cheers!

Upvotes: 2

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