First of all I would like to thank anyone who replies to this, your help is greatly appreciated!
I am trying to compute the standard deviation of a set of floating point numbers passed to my program as command line parameters. First I store each of the parameter strings in a temp
variable, then I parse them to floating point numbers using sscanf()
. My first problem is that the first (and when I say first, I am talking about the one after the name of my program...so actually the second) command line parameter doesn't get parsed. In the loop that I use to compute the average of the numbers I try to print out each parameter right after I parse it to a floating point number. It always prints all of them except the first one. The first one always gets printed as -nan
. Also, the variable std_dev
gets printed as -nan
as well, even though I never modify it. This puzzles me. What am I doing wrong?
Here is the code:
EXTERN printf
EXTERN sscanf
GLOBAL main
SEGMENT .data
form0: DB "The standard deviation is: %d", 10, 0
form1: DB "The standard deviation is: %f", 10, 0
fpform: DB "%f", 0
avg: DD 0.0
std_dev: DD 0.0
temp: DD 0.0
debugform: DB "temp=%f, std_dev=%f, avg=%f", 10, 0
SEGMENT .text
main:
push ebp ; compose stack frame
mov ebp, esp
push ebx
push ecx
mov ebx, [ebp + 8] ; ebx = # of params
mov ecx, [ebp + 12] ; ecx = ¶m_table
cmp ebx, dword 1 ; no params passed?
je .end_0 ; YES - print 0
; NO - compute and print std_dev
finit ; initialize fpu
fldz ; initialize fpu registers with 0's
fldz
fldz
fldz
fldz
fldz
fldz
fldz
call findStdDev ; find the standard deviation of the numbers passed as command line params
call debugPrint
pushad ; preserve all registers before making system call
fld dword [avg] ; load standard deviation into fpu
sub esp, 8 ; reserve space for a qword in the stack
fstp qword [esp] ; load the 64-bit representation of std_dev into stack
push form1 ; pass format string
call printf ; print out the standard deviation
add esp, 12
popad
jmp .end ;
pop ebp
ret
.end_0: ; if no parameters are passed, print std_dev = 0
push dword 0
push form0
call printf
add esp, 8
.end:
pop ecx
pop ebx
pop ebp ; restore used register and return from program
ret
;-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
findStdDev: ; assumes ebx = # params, ecx = ¶m_table
push edi ; save used regs
push esi
xor esi, esi ; clear esi as a precaution
mov esi, dword 1 ; loop counter for loop to find average of numbers
.find_avg:
cmp esi, ebx ; esi == number of params?
je ._break ; YES - break
pushad ; preserve registers before calling a C function
push temp ; temp storage for string representation of input nums
push fpform ; format string
push dword [ecx + esi*4] ; current command line param
call sscanf ; parse string to f.p.
add esp, 12
popad
call debugPrint ; should leave the CPU and FPU registers how they were before the call
fld dword [temp] ; st0 = temp ; st1 = sum
faddp st1, st0 ; st0 = sum + temp
;call debugPrint ; should leave the CPU and FPU registers how they were before the call
inc esi ; move to next command line param
jmp .find_avg
._break:
mov [temp], ebx ; temp = num of params
sub [temp], dword 1
fld dword [temp] ; st0 = #params; st1 = sum of params
fdivp st1, st0 ; st0 = (sum of params)/(#params)
fstp dword [avg] ; set avg; clear st0
pop esi
pop edi
ret
;----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
debugPrint:
pushfd
pushad
sub esp, 24
fld dword [avg]
fld dword [std_dev]
fld dword [temp]
fstp qword [esp]
fstp qword [esp+8]
fstp qword [esp+16]
push debugform
call printf
add esp, 28
popad
popfd
ret
Thanks again!
[Edit: I haven't finished actually computing the standard deviation. What I have there is just the loop that computes the average.]