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...