CODEWITHSUNDEEP
assemblykeywordmasm
superM
superM

Reputation: 8695

How does the 'label' keyword work in MASM?

What does this assembler code do?

someName label word
         dw 8 dup(0)

How does label work?

Upvotes: 2

Views: 16116

Answers (4)

Erwin Ouwejan
Erwin Ouwejan

Reputation: 1

A label is just a name for a specific location in your code or a specific memory address. By using labels instead of actual addresses, your code can be maintained much more easy because the labels do not need to change when you add code and move around code. The compiler compiles it to actual addresses underneath.

Upvotes: 0

Sujeet kumar
Sujeet kumar

Reputation: 11

A label can be placed at the beginning of a statement. During assembly, the label is assigned the current value of the active location counter and serves as an instruction operand. There are two types of lables: symbolic and numeric.

Upvotes: 1

Alexey Frunze
Alexey Frunze

Reputation: 62068

Typically label creates a symbolic name for the code/data that follows and also assigns it a type. It's similar to defining a variable with given name and type/size. But it does not actually allocate space for it. It can be used to create aliases to variables.

Upvotes: 5

Greg Hewgill
Greg Hewgill

Reputation: 993403

Despite your lack of details about which assembler you are using, I can take a guess.

The someName label word statement assigns the current address (of type word) to someName. This means that later in the program, you can use the label someName instead of a specific address.

The dw statement reserves some amount of space of type word. I'm not entirely certain what the 8dup(0) means, but it might be 8 words (16 bytes) of space.

Upvotes: 2

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