Assemblers for micro‐computers

Abstract An assembler which provides facilities for programming in assembly language for the Intel 8080A micro‐computer is described. This assembler is a single pass self‐assembler and it requires a storage of 2K bytes. The assembler has been designed to be operated from a keyboard to develop programs in assembly language. It allows subroutine calls and nesting of subroutines to any depth. It flashes syntax errors, if any, while an instruction is being keyed in. The most important feature of the assembler is that it does not require costly peripherals such as floppy discs, cassette tapes, etc. It operates through a keyboard with letters (A‐Z), Arabic numerals (0–9) and some special characters to accommodate mnemonics used in label, opcode and operand fields of programs in the assembly language. A display facility will be greatly helpful. In this paper, design and implementation details of assembler are presented. The authors have the view that assemblers for other micro‐computers can be designed and implemented on similar lines. Though implementation may slightly differ from one micro‐computer to another, the design details will mostly remain the same.