Masm

I want to learn assembly, so I was going to start reading "the art of assembly". Thing is, for what I've been told it will teach me MASM which is a kind of high level assembly. What does this mean? My main reason for learning assembly is to learn how the machine works, to be able to look at my c/c++ code and understand what's going on and so. The code that appears on my c++ deassembled code when I get errors is in MASM? Or can be put in the form of? Or just low level asm?

when referring to languages, "high-level" and "low-level" refers basically to how much like a real language the coding is. Example: c# is a higher language than C. Visual basic is higer yet. Assembly is a low-level but evidently masm is higher level, but it's still assembly. I've never used it, but it probably does windows function calls for you, etc.

so, can I deassemble it like with low level asm or there will be things that cannot be converted directly from machine code to MASM?

everything can be disassembled with a disassembler. it doesnt matter what language it was written in.

MASM is basically a whole lot of Macro's to make Windows programming in Assembly easier.

There are some differences, but its basically the same.

Have you ever looked at some decompiled code for a C++ application written using Windows APIs? Its extremely similar. But even when you compile an ASM program, some symbols will be changed.. and can't be directly converted back to their original names.

chem

isn't there a direct equivalence between asm and machine code?

Symbols are still changed during the compilation process..

chem