7. Memory access syntax -- Assembly

• On paper machine codes were often written with square brackets to delineate a memory location:

      10001011 [ 11111000 ]
  

• Modern Assembly languages retain square bracket notation:

      mov eax, dword ptr [y]  ; load y from memory into CPU register EAX
  

• From the Assembly prospective, y is actually the location of variable y in memory:

      mov eax, dword ptr [ 11111000b ]
  

  Here, the little b at the end of the 11111000 tells the Assembly that this is a binary number.