How to Shorten MIPS Print Statements

Question

I've been working on a program that calculates a GCD and LCM and then prints them out but have noticed I spend half of my code just printing stuff. I've had it organized by saving the text blocks as:

Ask_Input_1:
.asciiz "Enter first integer n1: "
Ask_Input_2:
.asciiz "Enter second integer n2"
GCD_Out:
.asciiz "The greatest common divisor of : "
LCM_Out:
.asciiz "The least common multiple of "
AND:
.asciiz " and "
IS:
.asciiz " is "

and then printing them with:

la, $a0, GCD_Out
li $v0, 4
syscall                 #print statement
la, $a0, ($s0)
li $v0, 1
syscall                 #print first number
la $a0, AND
li $v0, 4
syscall                 #print and
la $a0, ($s1)
li $v0, 1               #print second number
la $a0, IS
li $v0, 4
syscall                 #print is

This takes about 10 lines per each function, and seems super inefficient. There has to be a better way, right?

Answer 1

Sure, define a macro for it:

    .macro print_str (%str)
    .data
myLabel: .asciiz %str
    .text
    li $v0, 4
    la $a0, myLabel
    syscall
    .end_macro

.text
.globl main
main:

    print_str("Enter first integer n1: ")
    print_str("Enter second integer n2: ")
    print_str("The greatest common divisor of : ")

    li $v0,10
    syscall

SPIM doesn't seem to like that macro, but it works fine in MARS. If you're using the GNU assembler or something else, the syntax may be slightly different.