MAL 🤒

French for "sick," something you become if you have to write too much code in it.

• Andrew S. Tanenbaum

MAL is an assembler for the amic-0 Micro-Assembly Language.

Table of contents

• Build
• Usage
• Syntax and semantics
• References

Build

Project

The project is built with Gradle. The required version is automatically downloaded by the wrapper, so simply clone the repository and run the build task:

$ git clone https://github.com/albmoriconi/mal.git
$ cd mal
$ ./gradlew build

The built program archives with executables and library dependencies can be found in the build/distributions directory.

Source code documentation

To build the Javadoc for the project, run the javadoc Gradle task. The produced documentation can be found in the build/docs/javadoc directory.

Usage

usage: mal [options] <input>
Assembler for MIC-1 Micro-Assembly language

options:
 -f <format>   output format: binary (default) | text
 -h,--help     display this help and exit
 -o <file>     write output to <file>

Syntax and semantics

The language is based on the MIC-1 MAL, clearly described in Tanenbaum (2013). This section describes the changes made to its syntax and semantics.

Case

The language is case sensitive. Statements are lower case, register names are upper case.

Comments

Comments go from a # character to the end of line.

Statements

Two kinds of statements have been added: empty, that means that no bus, memory or ALU operation is made during the cycle, and halt, that translates to an empty instruction that has its address in the next address field.

Labels

The syntax for labels is label [= address]: where the optional address is hexadecimal, prefixed with 0x, and specifies the instruction position in the control store.

References

• Tanenbaum, A.S, and Austin, T. (2013). Structured Computer Organization (6th ed.). Pearson.