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Writing a Scripting Language

One of the projects that I am working on is how to write a scripting language using c++.  At first thought, I imagined the task to be hard, but to my surprise it is quiet easy. In this post I will introduce the basics.  However, I do suggest you visit my youtube channel and watch the video series . token evaluation process  As you can see from the image to the left, my script engine basically takes a string expression, converts it to tokens, determines its meaning, and then compiles the effective byte code. Byte code is the instruction set for my script language.  It will tell our virtual machine or virtual process what an instruction is suppose to do. In more detail, the script engine does a recursive call with the tokens to successfully generate all the corresponding byte code. Source Code This link contains the source code and is version 1 of script.

The Additon & Subtraction in Assembly

There is not much difficulty when it comes to addition and subtraction in assembly programming. Simply, additon and substraction breaks down to the following: add eax , ecx ; eax = eax + ecx, result in eax add eax , DWORD [ ebp - 4 ] ; eax = eax + localVar1, result in eax add DWORD [ ebp - 4 ] , DWORD [ ebp -4 ] ; illegal, with all instruction both operands can never be memory add DWORD [ ebp - 4 ] , eax ; [ebp-4] = [ebp-4] + eax sub eax , ecx ; eax = eax - ecx, result in eax sub eax , DWORD [ ebp - 4 ] ; eax = eax - localVar1, result in eax sub DWORD [ ebp - 4 ] , DWORD [ ebp -4 ] ; illegal, with all instruction both operands can never be memory sub DWORD [ ebp - 4 ] , eax ; [ebp-4] = [ebp-4] - eax A simple program to display the message about an arithetic operation like "Math: 8 + 4 = ?" can be achived b

Important Lessons to Remember from Assembly Language programming

Okay, so I have been writing assembly language programs for a little bit now and to be honest with everyone, not like it is not obvious, assembly can be very frustrating especially when you write code and it seems to make logical sense.  However, when you run the program, it either says segmentation fault, memory corruption issues, or the program displays a bunch of random text to the screen. Okay so, recently I have been trying to write an application that does something simple using assembly.  The goal was to write a program with Nasm and have it display the number of arguments passed to our program. From my previous posts, we know that ebp+4 contains the return address after the main method is executed.  We also now that ebp+8 is the first parameter passed to main,  ebp+12 is the second parameter, and so on and so on with 4 added to each time.  This is because from the C programming language the main method has a header declaration that is of the following syntax: int main(in

NASM Programming

Many of you, if you are like me, might be interested in how assembly works.  You will be very surprised that assembly is very very easy, especially after you write a couple of simple programs.  But don't get me wrong, you will be frustrated at first, however that frustration, if you channel it right, will lead to serious life long learning and will give you a deeper appreciation of the beauty of assembly. For more tutorial on assembly and visualization of these information, visit my youtube channel . Okay so lets get started. We will be using Netwide Assembler (NASM) to write our program. The general format of NASM file is this: ;This is a comment SECTION .data ;declare variable here SECTION .bss ;declare actual, dynamic variable SECTION .text ;where your program code/assembly code lives ; Working with Data Section In your .data section, you can declare variables like this: nameOfVariable: db 32 ;this declares a variable names nameOfVariable with byte valu