Assembly language

An assembly language (or assembler language) is a low-level programming language for a computer, or other programmable device, in which there is a very strong (generally one-to-one) correspondence between the language and the architecture's machine code instructions.

Description

Each assembly language is specific to a particular computer architecture, in contrast to most high-level programming languages, which are generally portable across multiple architectures, but require interpreting or compiling.

Assembly

Assembly language is converted into executable machine code by a utility program referred to as an assembler; the conversion process is referred to as assembly, or assembling the code.

Mnemonics

Assembly language uses a mnemonic to represent each low-level machine instruction or operation.

Typical operations

Typical operations require one or more operands in order to form a complete instruction, and most assemblers can therefore take labels, symbols and expressions as operands to represent addresses and other constants, freeing the programmer from tedious manual calculations.

Macro assemblers

Macro assemblers include a macroinstruction facility so that (parameterized) assembly language text can be represented by a name, and that name can be used to insert the expanded text into other code.

Features

Many assemblers offer additional mechanisms to facilitate program development, to control the assembly process, and to aid debugging.

See also

• Assembler
• Assembly
• Compiler
• Interpreter (computing)
• Low-level programming language
• Machine code
• Programming language

External links

• Assembly language @ Wikipedia