### 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. Conveniently, symbolic addresses and systems software make this unnecessary. This happens 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 15:

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