SoFunction
Updated on 2025-03-04

Detailed explanation of the difference between mov and lea instructions in assembly language

An instruction is a statement that becomes executable when the program is assembled and compiled. The assembler translates instructions into machine language bytes and is loaded and executed by the CPU at runtime.

A directive has four components:

Label (optional)
Instruction mnemonic (required)
Operands (usually required)
Comments (optional)

Recently, I have encountered many problems in the process of learning assembly language. This will be updated gradually in the future. This time I will talk about the difference between mov and lea instructions.

    1. Regarding whether there is any question about adding []

1. For the mov command:

Whether there is [] does not matter if the variable is, the result is all the value

For example: num dw 2

                                mov bx,num

                                mov cx,[num];bx=cx=2

For registers, [] means the address, but no [] means the value.

For example: num dw 2

                                mov ax,num

                                mov bx,ax;bx=2

mov bx,[ax];mov bx;DS:[ax], there may be an error here, in short, just understand the general meaning

2. For the lea instruction:

Is there any [] that doesn't matter if there is a variable, and the result is to take the address of the variable, which is equivalent to a pointer (opposite to mov)

For example: num dw 2

                                  lea  ebx,num;

                                  lea  eax,[num];ebx=eax

For registers, [] represents the value, but not [] represents the address.

For example: mov eax,2

                                   mov ebx,[eax];ebx=2

mov ebx,eax;eax=address, different from program

Summarize

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