Tracks
/
MIPS Assembly
MIPS Assembly
/
Exercises
/
Nucleotide Count
Nucleotide Count

Nucleotide Count

Easy

Instructions

Each of us inherits from our biological parents a set of chemical instructions known as DNA that influence how our bodies are constructed. All known life depends on DNA!

Note: You do not need to understand anything about nucleotides or DNA to complete this exercise.

DNA is a long chain of other chemicals and the most important are the four nucleotides, adenine, cytosine, guanine and thymine. A single DNA chain can contain billions of these four nucleotides and the order in which they occur is important! We call the order of these nucleotides in a bit of DNA a "DNA sequence".

We represent a DNA sequence as an ordered collection of these four nucleotides and a common way to do that is with a string of characters such as "ATTACG" for a DNA sequence of 6 nucleotides. 'A' for adenine, 'C' for cytosine, 'G' for guanine, and 'T' for thymine.

Given a string representing a DNA sequence, count how many of each nucleotide is present. If the string contains characters that aren't A, C, G, or T then it is invalid and you should signal an error.

For example:

"GATTACA" -> 'A': 3, 'C': 1, 'G': 1, 'T': 2
"INVALID" -> error

Registers

Register Usage Type Description
$a0 input address null-terminated input string
$a1 input/output address null-terminated result string (4 words)
$t0-9 temporary any for temporary storage
Edit via GitHub The link opens in a new window or tab
MIPS Assembly Exercism

Ready to start Nucleotide Count?

Sign up to Exercism to learn and master MIPS Assembly with 54 exercises, and real human mentoring, all for free.