SPIM - Are register/memory values retained until SPIM is reinitialized?

Question

So I'm turning in a project for class, and both parts of the program work.

However I noticed:

If I load the program (load "p5a.mal"), then execute it with run, it works.

If I type run a second time, type the same input, it shows behavior that indicates the variables declared in .text are retaining their values from the previous run.

An example of a variable being declared can be seen here:

#Used to store the word count in the given string (initialized to 0)
    wordcount:  .word       0

For example, if wordcount was 10 in the previous run, it outputs 20 in the second run.

Is this standard behavior of SPIM? Or am I not correctly zeroing out my variables?

I am aware SPIM has the "reinitialize" command, but should the second run just work anyway (without typing "reinitialize")?

Answer 1

My TA responded to my email, and SPIM does need to be reinitialized (with the reinitialize command) in order for registers and memory locations to be reset.