### A good answer might be:

Yes: the programmer must know the address in advance.

# Load Address Pseudoinstruction

It is not always possible to know the address in advance. But systems software and symbolic addresses make this unnecessary. The way this feature is accessed in assembly language is by using the `la` mnemonic. This mnemonic does not correspond to a single machine instruction. It is a pseudoinstruction that the assembler translates into to several machine instructions.

>     la   d,exp          #  load register $d with the address
>                         #  described by the expression "exp"
>                         #  "exp" is often a symbolic address
>                         #  (pseudoinstruction)

In this pseudoinstruction, `exp` is an expression that evaluates to a memory address. There are several possible forms for `exp`. Often it is a symbolic address. The `la` pseudoinstruction translates into different machine code instructions depending on `exp`.

### QUESTION 14:

Does the `la` instruction access (look at) memory?