Yes. A general purpose register can hold any 32-bit pattern.
## swap.asm
##
## Exchange the values in valA and valB
.text
.globl main
main:
lw $t0,valA # $t0 <-- valA
lw $t1,valB # $t1 <-- valB
sw $t0,valB # $t0 --> valB
sw $t1,valA # $t1 --> valA
li $v0,10 # code 10 == exit
syscall # Return to OS.
.data
valA: .float 8.32 # 32 bit floating point value
valB: .float -0.6234e4 # 32 bit floating point value
# small 'e' only
If you want to perform floating point arithmetic, then the floating point number must be in a floating point register.
The previous program exchanged the bit patterns held at two memory locations. Of course, memory can hold all possible bit patterns and general purpose registers can hold all possible bit patterns. The program could just as easily been written using general purpose registers since no arithmetic was done with the bit patterns in the registers:
For both single precision load and store instructions (as with the general purpose load and store instructions) the memory address must be full-word aligned. It must be a multiple of four. Ordinarily this is not a problem. The assembler takes care of this.
Do you think that the SPIM service that prints an integer can be used for floating point values?