Tutorial by Examples

Given that the 8086/8088 was used in the IBM PC, and the Operating System on that was most often from Microsoft, Microsoft's assembler MASM was the de facto standard for many years. It followed Intel's syntax closely, but permitted some convenient but "loose" syntax that (in hindsight) onl...

Intel wrote the specification of the 8086 assembly language, a derivative of the earlier 8080, 8008 and 4004 processors. As such, the assembler they wrote followed their own syntax precisely. However, this assembler wasn't used very widely. Intel defined their opcodes to have either zero, one or tw...

Although the 8086 was most used in IBM PCs along with Microsoft, there were a number of other computers and Operating Systems that used it too: most notably Unix. That was a product of AT&T, and it already had Unix running on a number of other architectures. Those architectures used more convent...

Borland started out with a Pascal compiler that they called "Turbo Pascal". This was followed by compilers for other languages: C/C++, Prolog and Fortran. They also produced an assembler called "Turbo Assembler", which, following Microsoft's naming convention, they called "T...

When the GNU project needed an assembler for the x86 family, they went with the AT&T version (and its syntax) that was associated with Unix rather than the Intel/Microsoft version.

NASM is by far the most ported assembler for the x86 architecture - it's available for practically every Operating System based on the x86 (even being included with MacOS), and is available as a cross-platform assembler on other platforms. This assembler uses Intel syntax, but it is different from ...

YASM is a complete rewrite of NASM, but is compatible with both Intel and AT&T syntaxes.