The Design and Implementation of.docVIP

A FLEXIBLE TOOL FOR VISUALIZING ASSEMBLY CODE Joshua C. Estep and Christopher A. Healy Department of Computer Science Furman University Greenville, SC 29613-1124 ABSTRACT Reading an assembly program can often be a tedious and slow process, and one can easily lose patience while looking for important features such as nested loops or function calls. In this paper the authors describe a tool in which this process is automated. Furthermore, we designed our tool in such a way that it can work for any assembly language. The tool actually consists of two programs that can be run independently – one program performs a basic parse of the assembly code to detect all the control-flow features. The other program takes this control-flow information and presents it in a Java GUI Frame. Although it is in the prototype stage and we are only using it in class for the first time, we have found our tool saves much human effort and is computationally efficient in discovering the structure of assembly code. 1. Introduction For many people, learning assembly language is difficult because of its terse syntax. When looking at an assembly source file, the register names do not easily correspond to meaningful information about a program. For example, the counter variable for a loop may be called “$s0” rather than the more familiar “i” or “count”. And the structure of the program, including control structures such as if-then constructs and loops, is not obvious, mainly because it is commonplace for assembly instructions to appear at the same level of indentation. So, for all practical purposes, the code is not indented, making it harder for the reader to see nested loops, “if” statements inside loops, etc. Although there is little demand for assembly programmers today, it is still important to expose computer science students to the realities of assembly code, because this knowledge gives a much more accurate view of the code that is actually being executed inside the