malformed for lw

[purpl3F0x]

I'm just learning mips, but I'm pretty sure this code should be correct.

.data
	ans: .word	42

.text
main:
	lw 	$a0, ans
	li 	$v0, 1
	syscall 

    li      $a0, 0   
    li      $v0, 10        
    syscall

Instead I get:

lw $a0, ans`:6 malformed for `lw` on

(platform is windows with python 3.7 x86_64)

[nbbeeken]

Hi! Thanks for giving my project a try, its still in progress so thank you for your patience with it 😅.

I've only permitted the non psuedo form of load word which would be lw $a0, 0($t0) where $t0 for example could hold an address. So quick fix would be to expand lw $a0, ans to:

la    $t0, ans
lw    $a0, 0($t0)

No need to read further if a solution is all you needed, but my thoughts on why this is is below:

So this still needs working out but psuedo instructions are not real in that they never make it to a mips cpu, they are expanded by the assembler to actual instructions. It was my thinking that I wanted to create something that only understood pure mips and that psuedo instructions would be some additional layer of preprocessing to be added later.
That being said there are a few that I added since it it really annoying to not have an easy way of loading addresses for an example. Still it felt strange to overload lw. Plus there may be a limitation in how I've implemented things but I would have to investigate.