Assembly difference between [var], and var

Question

I\'m learning Assembler and getting to the point where I actually have no clue about the difference between [variable] and variable. As the tutoria

Answer 1

Since you already know C++, I'm going to answer by showing you what the C equivalents of these expressions are.

When you write

[variable]

in assembly, it's equivalent to

*variable

in C. That is, treat variable as a pointer and dereference that pointer — get the value the the pointer is pointing to.

Similarly, the 'type identifiers' are like casting the pointer to a different type:

ASM:
    dword ptr [variable]
C:
    *((uint32_t*) variable)

ASM:
    word ptr [variable]
C:
    *((uint16_t*) variable)

I hope this helps you understand the meaning of these expressions.

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(this section refers to an addendum that has since been deleted from the original question)

I'm not entirely sure what problem you're experiencing with 'conversion to ascii', but I suspect you're just confused by how it's visually rendered in output or something.

For example if you have code like this:

myInteger db 41
mov AL, byte ptr [myInteger]

the mov will copy the value 41 from memory into the AL register. The number 41 happens to be the ascii representation for the ) character, but this doesn't change anything. Whether the value is interpreted as an ascii character or as an integer is up to you, because they are the same value.