Hi all, next month I'll must learn assembly for school. We'll use
TASM.
Happily, before the course started I bought the book Mastering Turbo
Assembler, in which the author, Tom Swan, expains assembly language
using examples written in Ideal mode.
However I discovered that my teacher want that we use MASM syntax.

Now, is there a way to use my book anyway? Are there some documents
which point out the differences between the two syntaxes?

Thanks in advance,
negroup

Negroup wrote:
> Hi all, next month I'll must learn assembly for school. We'll use
> TASM.
> Happily, before the course started I bought the book Mastering Turbo
> Assembler, in which the author, Tom Swan, expains assembly language
> using examples written in Ideal mode.
> However I discovered that my teacher want that we use MASM syntax.
> 
> Now, is there a way to use my book anyway?

I'm not familiar with the book, but almost certainly so. The 
"principles" - the machine code we want to produce - is the same, no 
matter what syntax we use. You might have to do a little "mental 
translation" to use a book in one syntax with an assembler "or "mode") 
with a different syntax. This might be an added level of confusion that 
you don't need, but it can almost certainly be done.

> Are there some documents
> which point out the differences between the two syntaxes?

Since Tasm will do both "Masm compatible" and "Ideal mode" syntax, I 
would expect that the Tasm Manual itself would have this information. 
Have you looked there?

Best,
Frank

Hello,

Negroup <spamtrap@crayne.org> wrote:

> Now, is there a way to use my book anyway? Are there some documents
> which point out the differences between the two syntaxes?

Yes, the TASM handbook(s).

Regards,
   Spiro.

-- 
Spiro R. Trikaliotis                              http://cbm4win.sf.net/
http://www.trikaliotis.net/                     http://www.viceteam.org/

There are some TASM and MASM faqs at
http://www.faqs.org/faqs/assembly-language/x86/

"Negroup" <spamtrap@crayne.org> wrote in message
news:2fdabf19.0507261321.70a0be4d@posting.google.com...
> Hi all, next month I'll must learn assembly for school. We'll use
> TASM.
> Happily, before the course started I bought the book Mastering Turbo
> Assembler, in which the author, Tom Swan, expains assembly language
> using examples written in Ideal mode.
> However I discovered that my teacher want that we use MASM syntax.
>
> Now, is there a way to use my book anyway? Are there some documents
> which point out the differences between the two syntaxes?
>
> Thanks in advance,
> negroup
>

Negroup wrote:
> Hi all, next month I'll must learn assembly for school. We'll use
> TASM.
> Happily, before the course started I bought the book Mastering Turbo
> Assembler, in which the author, Tom Swan, expains assembly language
> using examples written in Ideal mode.
> However I discovered that my teacher want that we use MASM syntax.
>
> Now, is there a way to use my book anyway? Are there some documents
> which point out the differences between the two syntaxes?
>
> Thanks in advance,
> negroup

For most of the work you'll be doing, ideal mode won't have much
impact. The place where ideal mode is syntactically incompatible with
standard Intel syntax is in the area of directives such as procedure
declarations. For normal machine instructions, ideal mode makes you
write code thusly:

   mov eax, [memoryAdrs]

whereas MASM generally specifies:

   mov eax, memoryAdrs

However, MASM *allows* the former version as well, so this shouldn't be
a problem as long as your instructor simply wants you to produce code
that compiles under MASM.

You can find the MASM manuals here:
http://webster.cs.ucr.edu/AsmTools/MASM/index.html

And the 16-bit edition of my Art of Assembly book appears here (also
using MASM syntax):

http://webster.cs.ucr.edu/AoA/index.html

I believe I would be more concerned about whether your instructor is
teaching 16-bit DOS assembly language (which is obsolete) versus 32-bit
x86 assembly (assuming, of course, that this is the case).
Cheers,
Randy Hyde