As it has been stated more than once in this book, Assembly is about moving and performing certain basic operations on data, and Assembly programming is about knowing what to move where and which operations to apply to it on the way. Until now, we have primarily dedicated all our attention to operations that we are able to perform on different types of data, and it is now time to talk about the data itself.
The least data item that is accessible on Intel architecture-based processors is bit, and the least addressable item is byte (which is 8 bits on Intel architecture). We already know how to work with such data and even words, double words, and single-precision floating-point values. Data, however, may be much more complex than that, and I do not mean quad words and/or double-precision floating points.
In this chapter, we will see how to declare, define, and manipulate simple and complex data structures and how this may make our lives as Assembly developers much easier. Starting with simple data structures, such as arrays, we will proceed to more complex ones containing different types of data and go through linked lists and trees toward more complex and powerful methods of data arrangement. The intention here, given that you as a developer are familiar with different data structures, is to show how easy it may be to work with them in Assembly, especially using FASM with its powerful features as an assembler.
The following are the data structures (data arrangement schemes) covered in this chapter:
- Arrays
- Structures
- Arrays of structures
- Linked lists and special cases thereof
- Binary Search Trees and balancing thereof
- Sparse matrices
- Graphs