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5 MIPS Assembly Language
• Today, digital computers are almost exclusively programmed using
high-level programming languages (PLs), e.g., C, C++, Java
• The CPU fetch–execute cycle, however, is not prepared to directly
execute high-level constructs like if-then-else, do-while, arithmetic,
method invocations, etc.
• Instead, a CPU can execute a limited number of rather primitive
instructions, its machine language instruction set
– Machine language instructions are encoded as bit patterns which are
interpreted during the instruction decode phase
– A C/C++/Java compiler is needed to translate high-level constructs
into a series of primitive machine instructions
