Beginner Errors On When Compiling a MIPS Assembly Source

Question

I'm trying to learn MIPS Assembly by learning MIPS Assembly Language Programming. In the book I have this code(extracted from the page 37 of the book): ``` .data prompt: .asciiz "
 Please Input a Value: " bye: .asciiz "
 Bye!" .globl main .text main: li $v0, 4 la $a0, prompt syscall li $v0, 5 syscall beqz $v0, end move $a0, $v0 li $v0, 1 syscall b main end: li $v0, 4 la $a0, bye syscall li $v0, 10 syscall ``` I have a cross-compiled binutils targeted to `mips-elf`, but when I've tried to Assemble the code, I got some errors ubuntu@eeepc:~/Desktop$ mips-elf-as test-mips.asm test-mips.asm: Assembler messages: test-mips.asm:8: Error: illegal operands 'li' test-mips.asm:9: Error: illegal operands 'la' test-mips.asm:12: Error: illegal operands 'li' test-mips.asm:14: Error: illegal operands 'beqz' test-mips.asm:15: Error: illegal operands 'move' test-mips.asm:16: Error: illegal operands 'li' test-mips.asm:22: Error: illegal operands 'li' test-mips.asm:23: Error: illegal operands 'la' test…

Accepted Answer

I think the problem is that you're using an older version of binutils which does not support the symbolic names for MIPS registers.

binutils 2.17 (as referenced in the cross-compilation instructions you linked to) does not understand `$v0`, `$a0` etc. (see this question).

However, if you are building the tools yourself anyway, a good solution would be to move to a later version of binutils: versions from 2.18 onwards do support symbolic register names. Your example assembles correctly with either 2.18 or the latest version, 2.20.

Beginner Errors On When Compiling a MIPS Assembly Source

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