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In computer programming, assembly language (alternatively assembler language [1] or symbolic machine code), [2] [3] [4] often referred to simply as assembly and commonly abbreviated as ASM or asm, is any low-level programming language with a very strong correspondence between the instructions in the language and the architecture's machine code instructions. [5]
Translation of assembly language into machine language. A much more human-friendly rendition of machine language, named assembly language, uses mnemonic codes to refer to machine code instructions, rather than using the instructions' numeric values directly, and uses symbolic names to refer to storage locations and sometimes registers. [3]
Machine code is the form in which code that can be directly executed is stored on a computer. It consists of machine language instructions, stored in memory, that perform operations such as moving values in and out of memory locations, arithmetic and Boolean logic, and testing values and, based on the test, either executing the next instruction in memory or executing an instruction at another ...
Individual machine languages are specific to a family of processors; machine-language code for one family of processors cannot run directly on processors in another family unless the processors in question have additional hardware to support it (for example, DEC VAX processors included a PDP-11 compatibility mode).
LLVM targets many platforms, however its main focus is not machine-dependent code generation; instead a more high-level typed assembly-like intermediate representation is used. Nevertheless for the most common targets the LLVM MC (machine code) project provides an assembler both as an integrated component of the compilers and as an external tool.
x86 assembly language is a family of low-level programming languages that are used to produce object code for the x86 class of processors. These languages provide backward compatibility with CPUs dating back to the Intel 8008 microprocessor, introduced in April 1972.
The code can be read and written by a programmer. To run on a computer it must be converted into a machine readable form, a process called assembly. [4] The language is specific to a particular processor family and environment. [2]
From the 1940s to the late 1970s, a large portion of programming was done in assembly language; higher-level instructions mean greater programmer productivity, so an important advantage of microcode was the relative ease by which powerful machine instructions can be defined.