On Fri, Oct 30, 2009 at 10:16:14AM +0800, Chih-hung Lu wrote: > May I ask a question, > what is the difference between "addu a0, 4" and "addiu a0, a0, 4"? That's because you are human - you're smart enough to notice the difference without even thinking about it :) The machine instructions addu and addiu differ. Addiu takes an immediate constant as it's last op. Addu takes a register instead. Now the assembler is trying to make things a little easier to us. Depending on the type of the last argument it will assemble an "addu" assembler instruction either into an addiu or addu. The other difference between the two instructions used in your example is that the first has two operands, the other three operands. If there is only two operands, the assembler will implicitly assume, that the 2nd register is the same as the first register. Or in other words, the code generated from both will be entirely identical. Ralf
