Assembly (x86): db 'string',0 does not get executed unless there's a jump instruction

Question

I\'ve been banging my head against the wall in an attempt to understand why the following assembly is not correctly dumping the contents of \'HELLO_WORLD\'.

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Answer 1

Execution starts at the top. If you omit the jmp start then the character h will get interpreted by the CPU as if it were an instruction. Surely you see that such can not be correct?

as far I was concerned, there was no distinction between code and data?

There's no distinction between code and data when we consider their placement in the binary. But code and data still remain 2 completly different items. Code being the only one that can get executed by the CPU.