What is MASM? Explain its features.

MASM: Microsoft Macro Assembler

The Microsoft Macro Assembler (MASM) is an assembler for the x86 family of microprocessors, originally produced Microsoft MS-DOS operating system.

The features of MASM are listed below:

       i.            It supported a wide variety of macro facilities and structured programming idioms, including high-level constructions for looping, procedure calls and alternation (therefore, MASM is an example of a high-level assembler).

    ii.            MASM is one of the few Microsoft development tools for which there was no separate 16-bit and 32-bit version.

 iii.            Assembler affords the programmer looking for additional performance a three pronged approach to performance based solutions.

  iv.            MASM can build very small high performance executable files that are well suited where size and speed matter.

     v.            When additional performance is required for other languages, MASM can enhance the performance of these languages with small fast and powerful dynamic link libraries.

  vi.            For programmers who work in Microsoft Visual C/C++, MASM builds modules and libraries that are in the same format so the C/C++ programmer can build modules or libraries in MASM and directly link them into their own C/C++ programs. This allows the C/C++ programmer to target critical areas of their code in a very efficient and convenient manner, graphics manipulation, games, very high speed data manipulation and processing, parsing at speeds that most programmers have never seen, encryption, compression and any other form of information processing that is processor intensive.

vii.            MASM32 has been designed to be familiar to programmers who have already written API based code in Windows. The invoke syntax of MASM allows functions to be called in much the same way as they are called in a high level compiler.