Summary

We have introduced the basic elements of the computer from the viewpoint of the assembly language programmer. Important concepts include the instruction execution cycle, the way that addresses are assigned to information units in memory, and the encoding of various data types within information units. We have illustrated these for Itanium architecture in particular, with an occasional reference to their counterparts for other architectures.

When you have mastered these concepts, you can proceed in Chapter 3 to an explanation of the assembler that translates programs from a format readable by humans into the binary format actually processed by the computer. We shall introduce symbolic debuggers, which can interpret any binary number in many representations. In order for you to be secure in your understanding of such output in context, it is important that you appreciate the many distinctions described throughout this chapter.