Explanation Continued

The blank line is ignored. Next comes main: This defines a symbolic address (sometimes called a statement label). A symbolic address is a symbol (an identifier) that is the source code name for a location in memory. In this program, main stands for the address of the first machine instruction (which turns out to be 0x00400000). Using a symbolic address is much easier than using a numerical address. With a symbolic address, the programmer refers to memory locations by name and lets the assembler figure out the numerical address.

## Program to add two plus three 
        .text
        .globl  main

main:
        ori     $8,$0,0x2       # put two's comp. two into register 8
        ori     $9,$0,0x3       # put two's comp. three into register 9
        addu    $10,$8,$9       # add register 8 and 9, put result in 10

## End of file

The symbol main is global. This means that several source files are able to use main to refer to the same main storage address.