Assembly language is a low-level way of instructing a computer, using symbolic representations of binary language. It was created to make programming easier and faster. Assembly language is dependent on the CPU family and is mostly used for specialized CPUs or to ensure speed.
An assembly language is a low-level way of instructing a computer to do a task. Computers do not inherently understand human instructions. At the most basic level, computers understand instructions in binary language, which are sequences of zeros and ones. However, binary language or machine language is extremely complicated to program. Assembly language was invented as a symbolic representation of the underlying sequences of zeros and ones.
Suppose we program a game that gives the player five points for a certain action. The computer keeps the score in a certain position; locations are a place of storage within the CPU, called a “registry”, or in a space in memory. The computer understands positions and low-level actions called operations. So if the score is held in the RA register, then it includes the command, 0101 1100 0000 0101, where the first four numbers indicate the ADD operation, the next four indicate the RA register, and the last eight indicate the number 5.
Computers were originally supposed to be coded this way; machine language is slow, prone to errors, and it can be very difficult for one person to understand what another person is trying to encode. Thus computer programmers have created a language in which operations, places, numbers, etc., can be better understood. So the equivalent command for the previous example would be ADD RA 5. In this hypothetical example, mnemonics are used for the ADD operation and the RA register, and the number 5 is written in digits.
A program called an assembler converts assembly language code into the underlying machine language. In the past, this conversion also used expensive processing resources, so opcodes, opcodes for short, such as Subtract were abbreviated SUB, Copy-Move was abbreviated MOV, and in some cases ADD was also abbreviated A.
Assembly language is mostly a thin layer on top of the machine structure. So the opcodes, registers and the whole language are very dependent on the CPU family. So, Intel x86 family has opcodes like MOV, MOVSX and MOVZX, while IBM 360 has opcodes like MVI, MVC, MVZ. When designing a computer or CPU, designers specify machine language including opcodes.
Programmers soon switched to “high-level” languages like COBOL, Pascal, C++, and SQL. Compilers convert code written in these languages into machine language. However, assembly code is still used for specialized CPUs or to ensure speed from game consoles to car systems.
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