Intel x86 Assembly Language & Microarchitecture Assemblers AT&T assembler - as
Example
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 conventional assembly syntax - especially that two-operand instructions specified them in source, dest order.
So AT&T assembler conventions overrode the conventions dictated by Intel, and a whole new dialect was introduced for the x86 range:
- Register names were prefixed by
%:
%al,%bxetc. - Immediate values were prefied by
$:
$4 - Operands were in
source,destorder - Opcodes included their operand sizes:
movw $4, %ax ; Move word 4 into AX
