Review | Programming from the Ground Up

What does it mean if a line in the program starts with the '#' character?
What is the difference between an assembly language file and an object code file?
What does the linker do?
How do you check the result status code of the last program you ran?
What is the difference between movl $1, %eax and movl 1, %eax?
Which register holds the system call number?
What are indexes used for?
Why do indexes usually start at 0?
If I issued the command movl data_items (, %edi, 4), %eax and data_items was address 3634 and %edi held the value 13, what address would you be using to move into %eax?
List the general-purpose registers.
What is the difference between movl and movb?
What is flow control?
What does a conditional jump do?
What things do you have to plan for when writing a program?
Go through every instruction and list what addressing mode is being used for each operand.

Modify the first program to return the value 3.
Modify the maximum program to find the minimum instead.
Modify the maximum program to use the number 255 to end the list rather than the number 0
Modify the maximum program to use an ending address rather than the number 0 to know when to stop.
Modify the maximum program to use a length count rather than the number 0 to know when to stop.
What would the instruction movl _start, %eax do? Be specific, based on your knowledge of both addressing modes and the meaning of _start. How would this differ from the instruction movl $_start, %eax?

Modify the first program to leave off the int instruction line. Assemble, link, and execute the new program. What error message do you get. Why do you think this might be?
So far, we have discussed three approaches to finding the end of the list - using a special number, using the ending address, and using the length count. Which approach do you think is best? Why? Which approach would you use if you knew that the list was sorted? Why?