Text Templates in Assembly Language

Assembly Language doesn’t have built-in support for string manipulation or templating like high-level languages do. However, we can demonstrate a basic example of printing text to the console, which is analogous to the simplest form of templating.

section .data
    message db 'Value is: ', 0
    value db '42', 0
    newline db 10, 0

section .text
    global _start

_start:
    ; Print "Value is: "
    mov eax, 4
    mov ebx, 1
    mov ecx, message
    mov edx, 11
    int 0x80

    ; Print the value
    mov eax, 4
    mov ebx, 1
    mov ecx, value
    mov edx, 2
    int 0x80

    ; Print newline
    mov eax, 4
    mov ebx, 1
    mov ecx, newline
    mov edx, 1
    int 0x80

    ; Exit the program
    mov eax, 1
    xor ebx, ebx
    int 0x80

This Assembly code (for x86 Linux) demonstrates a very basic form of templating by printing a message followed by a value. Here’s a breakdown of what it does:

1. We define our data in the .data section. This includes our message, the value to be printed, and a newline character.

2. In the _start routine:

   • We first print the message “Value is: " using the sys_write system call (interrupt 0x80 with eax=4).
   • Then we print the value “42” using another sys_write call.
   • Finally, we print a newline character.

3. The program exits using the sys_exit system call (interrupt 0x80 with eax=1).

This is a very simplistic example and doesn’t provide the flexibility of text templates in high-level languages. In Assembly, you would typically need to implement your own string manipulation and formatting functions to achieve more complex templating.

To assemble and run this program (on a Linux system with NASM):

$ nasm -f elf template.asm
$ ld -m elf_i386 -o template template.o
$ ./template
Value is: 42

Note that Assembly Language is low-level and platform-specific. This example is for x86 Assembly on Linux. Different architectures or operating systems would require different Assembly code.

In practice, templating in Assembly would be very cumbersome and is rarely done. For such tasks, higher-level languages are typically used, even in systems programming contexts.