Turbo Assembler Explained

Turbo Assembler
Developer:Borland
Latest Release Version:5.4
Operating System:MS-DOS, Windows
Genre:Assembler
License:Proprietary

Turbo Assembler (sometimes shortened to the name of the executable, TASM) is an assembler for software development published by Borland in 1989. It runs on and produces code for 16- or 32-bit x86 MS-DOS and compatibles or Microsoft Windows. It can be used with Borland's other language products: Turbo Pascal, Turbo Basic, Turbo C, and Turbo C++. The Turbo Assembler package is bundled with Turbo Linker and is interoperable with Turbo Debugger.

Borland advertised Turbo Assembler as being 2-3 times faster than its primary competitor, Microsoft Macro Assembler (MASM). TASM can assemble source in a MASM-compatible mode or an ideal mode with a few enhancements. Object-Oriented programming was added in version 3. The last version of Turbo Assembler is 5.4, with files dated 1996 and patches up to 2010; it is still included with Delphi and C++Builder.

TASM itself is a 16-bit program. It will run on 16- and 32-bit versions of Windows, and produce code for the same versions, but it does not generate 64-bit x86 code. Turbo Assembler 5.0 (at least) also contains a 32-bit PE version of tasm called TASM32.EXE.

Example

A Turbo Assembler program that prints 'Merry Christmas!':

.model small.stack 100h.datamsg db "Merry christmas!",'$'.codemain proc mov ax, SEG msg mov ds, ax mov dx, offset msg mov ah, 9 int 21h mov ax, 4c00h int 21hmain endpend main

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