Types in Depth

Types in Depth

In this lesson — part of Data Deep Dive — you'll learn types in depth in Assembly and why it matters in real work.

Why it matters

Types tell you what operations make sense and catch whole classes of bugs early.

Key ideas

• Common types: text, numbers, booleans
• Type conversion and coercion
• When to be explicit about types
• Type errors and how to read them

In practice

Here's how it looks in idiomatic Assembly:

section .data
    b  db 0xFF          ; byte  (8-bit)
    w  dw 0xFFFF        ; word  (16-bit)
    d  dd 1.5           ; dword as 32-bit IEEE-754 float
    q  dq 0x1122334455667788
section .text
    movsx rax, byte [b] ; sign-extend 8 -> 64
    movzx rcx, byte [b] ; zero-extend 8 -> 64

Assembly note: Bits carry no type — the same 64 bits are 'signed' or 'unsigned' purely by which instruction you choose (e.g. movsx vs movzx, or jl vs jb), and float-ness exists only when you route them through XMM/x87 registers.

Try it yourself

Exercise: In Assembly, convert a number to text and back, and print both.

Recap

You now understand types in depth and can apply it in Assembly. Mark this lesson complete and continue to the next one.