3 ms·

I read it as one assembly instruction can map to one of several machine instructions.

• userbinator 10y ago
  That is also true --- for example, "mov reg, reg" is a special case of "mov reg, r/m" or "mov r/m, reg" with the r/m specifying a register, so basically two separate sequences of bytes which perform the same operation. This has been exploited by copy-protection and steganography, going back to the A86 shareware assembler which was the first use of this technique that I can remember, to more recent developments: https://www.cs.columbia.edu/~angelos/Papers/hydan.pdf https://www.cs.columbia.edu/~angelos/Papers/hydan.pdf http://stackoverflow.com/questions/17973103/why-does-the-solaris-assembler-generate-different-machine-code-than-the-gnu-asse http://stackoverflow.com/questions/17973103/why-does-the-sol... (Almost wish that last link was cut off one letter earlier...)