1.3 The Assembly Process

Creating and running an executable file involves several processes:

Assembling the source code into an object file

Linking the object file with other modules or libraries into an executable program

Loading that program into memory

Running the program

Once you have written your assembly-language program, MASM provides several options for assembling it. The OPTION directive, new to MASM 6.0, has several different arguments that let you control the way MASM assembles your programs.

Summary: You can control assembly behavior with conditional assembly.

Conditional assembly allows you to create one source file that can generate a variety of programs, depending on the status of various conditional-assembly statements.