Yes, this is my first assembly program. I had to look up every instruction and it took me hours to understand even the basics, but it was worth it. I have a much better understanding of x86 assembly and plan to write larger programs to continue learning in 2017.

I went with 32 bit because all the examples were 64 bit so I forced to learn the nasm and ld flags to get my program to compile, link, and run. I also learned a lot about the different registers available to 32 and 64 bit programs.

What caught my attention was the segment register use --- besides the fact that Linux runs processes in flat mode, the more common way to es = ds is push ds; pop es.

That said, it does look better than compiler output and distinctly has the style of hand-written Asm; the 3 pops at the beginning, for example, would be something no compiler I've seen can do. (Minor "optimisation" --- rethinking your register use can eliminate some superfluous moves.)