Insights Blog
-- Browse All Articles --
Physics Articles
Physics Tutorials
Physics Guides
Physics FAQ
Math Articles
Math Tutorials
Math Guides
Math FAQ
Education Articles
Education Guides
Bio/Chem Articles
Technology Guides
Computer Science Tutorials
Forums
Trending
Featured Threads
Log in
Register
What's new
Search
Search
Google search
: add "Physics Forums" to query
Search titles only
By:
Latest activity
Register
Menu
Log in
Register
Navigation
More options
Contact us
Close Menu
JavaScript is disabled. For a better experience, please enable JavaScript in your browser before proceeding.
You are using an out of date browser. It may not display this or other websites correctly.
You should upgrade or use an
alternative browser
.
Forums
Assembly language
Recent contents
View information
Top users
Description
In computer programming, assembly language (or assembler language), sometimes abbreviated asm, is any low-level programming language in which there is a very strong correspondence between the instructions in the language and the architecture's machine code instructions. Because assembly depends on the machine code instructions, every assembly language is designed for exactly one specific computer architecture. Assembly language may also be called symbolic machine code.Assembly code is converted into executable machine code by a utility program referred to as an assembler. The conversion process is referred to as assembly, as in assembling the source code. Assembly language usually has one statement per machine instruction (1:1), but constants, comments, assembler directives, symbolic labels of program and memory locations, and macros are generally also supported.
The term "assembler" is generally attributed to Wilkes, Wheeler and Gill in their 1951 book The Preparation of Programs for an Electronic Digital Computer, who, however, used the term to mean "a program that assembles another program consisting of several sections into a single program".Each assembly language is specific to a particular computer architecture and sometimes to an operating system. However, some assembly languages do not provide specific syntax for operating system calls, and most assembly languages can be used universally with any operating system, as the language provides access to all the real capabilities of the processor, upon which all system call mechanisms ultimately rest. In contrast to assembly languages, most high-level programming languages are generally portable across multiple architectures but require interpreting or compiling, a much more complicated task than assembling.
The computational step when an assembler is processing a program is called assembly time.
View More On Wikipedia.org
Forums
Back
Top