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to Trinary in the MIPS Assembly Track

Published at Jul 13 2018 · 1 comment
Test suite

Convert a trinary number, represented as a string (e.g. '102012'), to its decimal equivalent using first principles.

The program should consider strings specifying an invalid trinary as the value 0.

Trinary numbers contain three symbols: 0, 1, and 2.

The last place in a trinary number is the 1's place. The second to last is the 3's place, the third to last is the 9's place, etc.

# "102012"
    1       0       2       0       1       2    # the number
1*3^5 + 0*3^4 + 2*3^3 + 0*3^2 + 1*3^1 + 2*3^0    # the value
  243 +     0 +    54 +     0 +     3 +     2 =  302

If your language provides a method in the standard library to perform the conversion, pretend it doesn't exist and implement it yourself.



Submitting Incomplete Solutions



# Test trinary_convert with some examples
# s0 - num of tests left to run
# s1 - address of input word
# s2 - address of expected output word
# s3 - char byte
# s4 - output word
# trinary_convert must:
# - be named trinary_convert and declared as global
# - read input address of string from a0
# - follow the convention of using the t0-9 registers for temporary storage
# - (if it uses s0-7 then it is responsible for pushing existing values to the stack then popping them back off before returning)
# - write integer result to v0


# number of test cases
n: .word 6
# input values (null terminated) & expected output values (word sized ints)
ins:  .asciiz "0", "1", "10", "102101", "22222", "10000"
outs: .word     0,   1,    3,      307,    242,       81

failmsg: .asciiz "failed for test input: "
okmsg: .asciiz "all tests passed"


        lw      $s0, n
        la      $s1, ins
        la      $s2, outs

        move    $a0, $s1                # move address of input str to a0
        jal     trinary_convert         # call subroutine under test
        move    $v1, $v0                # move return value in v0 to v1 because we need v0 for syscall

        lw      $s4, 0($s2)             # read expected output from memory
        bne     $v1, $s4, exit_fail     # if expected doesn't match actual, jump to fail

        addi    $s1, $s1, 1             # move input address on byte forward
        lb      $s3, 0($s1)             # load byte
        beq     $s3, $zero, done_scan   # if char null, break loop
        j       scan                    # loop

        addi    $s1, $s1, 1             # move input address on byte past null

        addi    $s2, $s2, 4             # move to next word in output
        sub     $s0, $s0, 1             # decrement num of tests left to run
        bgt     $s0, $zero, run_test    # if more than zero tests to run, jump to run_test

        la      $a0, okmsg              # put address of okmsg into a0
        li      $v0, 4                  # 4 is print string

        li      $v0, 10                 # 10 is exit with zero status (clean exit)

        la      $a0, failmsg            # put address of failmsg into a0
        li      $v0, 4                  # 4 is print string

        move    $a0, $s1                # print input that failed on
        li      $v0, 4

        li      $a0, 1                  # set error code to 1
        li      $v0, 17                 # 17 is exit with error

# # Include your implementation here if you wish to run this from the MARS GUI.
# .include "impl.mips"
# read a string representation of a ternary number and
# return its integer equivalent
# a0::String -> v0::Signed
	li	$v0, 0

	lb	$t0, 0($a0)
	beq	$t0, $0, return
	addi	$a0, $a0, 1
	sll	$t1, $v0, 1
	add	$v0, $v0, $t1
	addi	$t0, $t0, -48
	bltz	$t0, fail # below the '0' - '2' range
	addi	$t1, $t0, -3
	bgez	$t1, fail # above the '0' - '2' range
	add	$v0, $v0, $t0
	b	loop

	li	$v0, -1

	jr	$ra

Community comments

Avatar of shmibs

stole from @ozan to avoid using li and drop one real instruction

What can you learn from this solution?



  • What compromises have been made?