Recursive Fibonacci in Assembly

Question

I\'m attempting to implement a recursive Fibonacci program in Assembly. However, my program crashes, with an unhandled exception, and I can\'t seem to pick out the problem.

Answer 1

Several problems:

• if you are going to pass parameters on the stack, you don't have the right (standard) function entry, so EBP points to the wrong place
• you aren't saving the argument value properly in edx

Here's what I think you wanted, assuming you are passing parameters on the stack (best to add a comment to each instruction making it clear what you think it does):

Fibonacci proc
  PUSH EBP          ; save previous frame pointer
  MOV  EBP, ESP     ; set current frame pointer

  MOV  EAX, [EBP+8] ; get argument N
  CMP  EAX, 1       ; N<=1?
  JA   Recurse      ; no, compute it recursively
  MOV  ECX, 1       ; yes, Fib(1)--> 1
  JMP  exit

Recurse:
  DEC  EAX          ; = N-1
  MOV  EDX, EAX     ; = N-1
  PUSH EDX          ; save N-1
  PUSH EAX          ; set argument = N-1
  CALL Fibonacci    ; compute Fib(N-1) to ECX
  POP  EAX          ; pop N-1
  DEC  EAX          ; = N-2
  PUSH ECX          ; save Fib(N-1)
  PUSH EAX          ; set argument = N-2
  CALL Fibonacci    ; compute Fib(N-2) to ECX
  POP  EAX          ; = Fib(N-1)
  ADD  ECX, EAX     ; = Fib(N-1)+FIB(N-2)
exit:
  MOV  ESP,EBP      ; reset stack to value at function entry 
  POP  EBP          ; restore caller's frame pointer
  RET               ; and return

But you don't have to pass the parameters on the stack. It is more efficient to use the registers:

Fibonacci proc ; computes Fib(EAX) --> EAX; do not call with EAX==0
  CMP  EAX, 1      ; N<=1?
  JBE  exit        ; yes, we have the answer
  DEC  EAX         ; = N-1
  PUSH EAX         ; save N-1
  CALL Fibonacci   ; computing FIB(n-1)to EAX
  XCHG EAX,0[ESP]  ; swap FIB(n-1) for saved N-1 (You'll love this instruction, look it up in the Intel manual)
  DEC  EAX         ; = N-2
  CALL Fibonacci   ; computing FIB(N-2) to EAX
  POP  ECX         ; = FIB(N-1)
  ADD  EAX,ECX     ; = FIB(N-1)+FIB(N-2)
exit:
  RET