UMBC CMSC 313, Computer Organization & Assembly Language, Fall 2002, Section 0101

Project 4: Quicksort

Also available in PDF.

Due: Thursday October 17, 2002

Objective

The objective of this programming exercise is to practice writing assembly language programs that use the C function call conventions.

Assignment

Write an assembly language program that asks the user to enter a sequence of numbers in stdin then outputs the same sequence sorted in increasing order to stdout. The numbers must be input and output in base 10 and stored as signed 32-bit numbers. You may use the C functions scanf() and printf() for I/O. You must use the qsort() function from the C standard library to sort the data. The qsort() function has the following function prototype: void qsort(void *base, size_t nmemb, size_t size, int (*compar)(const void *, const void *)); The first parameter to qsort() is the address of the "array" to be sorted. The second parameter is the number of items in the array. The third parameter specifies the size of each element of the array in bytes (in our case, 32 bits equals 4 bytes). The last parameter is the entry address of a comparison function. You must write this comparison function in assembly language. The comparison function takes two pointers to items of the same type as those in the array and returns a negative number, zero or a positive number if the first item is respectively less than, equal to or greater than the second item.

Implementation Issues:

  1. Function calls to scanf(), printf() and qsort() must follow the C function call convention as described in class for the gcc compiler running on a Linux/Pentium platform. Notes on this are available here.

  2. Notes on using gcc to link assembly language programs that make calls to standard C library functions are available here.

  3. You may assume that the user will not enter more than 1000 numbers. If the user exceeds the capacity of your array, your program should generate an error.

Turning in your program

Use the UNIX script command to record some sample runs of your program. You do not need to demonstrate use of the debugger for this assignment.

You should submit two files: 1) your assembly language program and 2) a typescript file of your sample runs. The class name for submit is 'cs313-0101' and the assignment name is 'proj4'. The UNIX command to do this should look something like:

submit cs313-0101 proj4 quicksort.asm typescript

Last Modified: 10 Oct 2002 21:47:04 EDT by Richard Chang
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