Indirection

[KermMartian]

Q: What's with the parentheses sometimes used with ld?
A: OK, this is because of something called indirection. For simplicity's sake, let's assume you have a piece of memory that can hold exactly 2^16th bytes (sets of 8 bits). That means that you can 'address' the memory by assigning each of the 2^16 bytes with a number between 0 and 65535. Now, each of these spaces store a byte, so you want to be able to get the contents and store to each (reading and writing). Since registers can store numbers (a, b, c, d, e, h, and l hold one byte, and bc, de, hl, sp, ix, and iy hold 2 bytes each). Two bytes is exactly what we need to store 16-bit numbers, so let's put the number, hmmm, 42 in hl. That means hl will hold the number 42. In order to actually put 42 in hl, we use a regular load statement:

[calc84maniac]

Yes, it somehow does.
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[something1990]

It more than "somehow does" make sense. Kerm explained it in an understandable way. I have one question though. You have to load the address to hl and then load the value to that address right? You can't simply do ld (1337) , 42?
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[KermMartian]

Only because of limitations of the z80. That's essentially what I'm doing in two instructions.
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[Ultimate Dev'r]

Generally you don't have this problem with microcontrollers
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[KermMartian]

By the way, here are the C equivalents: