Category:Assembly

Assembly language (or just assembly; often abbreviated asm; sometimes called assembler, although that more properly refers to the program that translates the assembly source into machine code) is a term used for a language which is as close to raw machine code as a language can get.

Usually assembly languages use textual "mnemonic" instructions that correspond directly to binary machine code instructions (merely hiding details of bit-wise encoding), except for macros which expand to multiple instructions, and often give direct control over the overall layout of the assembled program on disk and in memory. Available instructions and codes are specific to the architecture being programmed on (although there are assemblers which provide an abstracted, non-architecture-specific language; the most notable one is the GNU Assembler). Assembly programs are typically loaded directly into a computer's memory and run from there.

[edit] See also

• Assembly language on Wikipedia (includes an in-depth discussion of assembly)
• High-level assembler (a.k.a. macro assembler) on Wikipedia
• Compare with Microcode.