What does assembly language mean?

Definitions for assembly language
as·sem·b·ly lan·guage

This dictionary definitions page includes all the possible meanings, example usage and translations of the word assembly language.

Princeton's WordNet

  1. assembly languagenoun

    a low-level programing language; close approximation to machine language

GCIDE

  1. assembly languagenoun

    (Computers) an artificial computer language with mnemonic codes representing the basic machine-language instructions of a computer, which can be interpreted by an assembler to produce a computer program in machine language. Also informally referred to as assembler. Writing a program in assembly language is very much simpler than writing the machine instructions in binary code, and the use of such a language greatly increases the efficiency of the process of writing computer programs. See also programming language, FORTRAN, BASIC.

Wiktionary

  1. assembly languagenoun

    A programming language in which the source code of programs is composed of mnemonic instructions, each of which corresponds directly to a machine instruction for a particular processor.

Wikipedia

  1. Assembly language

    In computer programming, assembly language (or assembler language, or symbolic machine code), 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. Assembly language usually has one statement per machine instruction (1:1), but constants, comments, assembler directives, symbolic labels of, e.g., memory locations, registers, and macros are generally also supported. The first assembly code in which a language is used to represent machine code instructions is found in Kathleen and Andrew Donald Booth's 1947 work, Coding for A.R.C.. Assembly code is converted into executable machine code by a utility program referred to as an assembler. 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". The conversion process is referred to as assembly, as in assembling the source code. The computational step when an assembler is processing a program is called assembly time. Because assembly depends on the machine code instructions, each assembly language is specific to a particular computer architecture.Sometimes there is more than one assembler for the same architecture, and sometimes an assembler is specific to an operating system or to particular operating systems. Most 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, much more complicated tasks than assembling. In the first decades of computing, it was commonplace for both systems programming and application programming to take place entirely in assembly language. While still irreplaceable for some purposes, the majority of programming is now conducted in higher-level interpreted and compiled languages. In "No Silver Bullet", Fred Brooks summarised the effects of the switch away from assembly language programming: "Surely the most powerful stroke for software productivity, reliability, and simplicity has been the progressive use of high-level languages for programming. Most observers credit that development with at least a factor of five in productivity, and with concomitant gains in reliability, simplicity, and comprehensibility."Today, it is typical to use small amounts of assembly language code within larger systems implemented in a higher-level language, for performance reasons or to interact directly with hardware in ways unsupported by the higher-level language. For instance, just under 2% of version 4.9 of the Linux kernel source code is written in assembly; more than 97% is written in C.

ChatGPT

  1. assembly language

    Assembly language is a low-level programming language that closely corresponds to the machine code instructions of a specific computer architecture. It is designed to be easily translated into machine code and has a very strong correspondence with the architecture's instruction set. It uses simple mnemonic codes for operations and allows symbolic naming of storage locations, which simplifies coding compared to writing in pure machine code. However, it demands detailed knowledge of the computer's architecture and hardware.

Wikidata

  1. Assembly language

    An assembly language is a low-level programming language for a computer, or other programmable device, in which there is a very strong correspondence between the language and the architecture's machine code instructions. Each assembly language is specific to a particular computer architecture, in contrast to most high-level programming languages, which are generally portable across multiple systems. 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. Assembly language uses a mnemonic to represent each low-level machine operation or opcode. Some opcodes require one or more operands as part of the instruction, and most assemblers can take labels and symbols as operands to represent addresses and constants, instead of hard coding them into the program. Macro assemblers include a macroinstruction facility so that assembly language text can be pre-assigned to a name, and that name can be used to insert the text into other code. Many assemblers offer additional mechanisms to facilitate program development, to control the assembly process, and to aid debugging.

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Numerology

  1. Chaldean Numerology

    The numerical value of assembly language in Chaldean Numerology is: 4

  2. Pythagorean Numerology

    The numerical value of assembly language in Pythagorean Numerology is: 2


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"assembly language." Definitions.net. STANDS4 LLC, 2024. Web. 3 Dec. 2024. <https://www.definitions.net/definition/assembly+language>.

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