INTRODUCTION TO ASSEMBLY LANGUAGE

INTRODUCTION TO 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 one-to-one correspondence between the language and the architecture’s machine code instructions. Assembly language is converted into executable machine code by a utility program referred to as assembler, the conversion process is referred to as assembly or assembling the code.

Assembly language is fast and powerful because of its correspondence with machine language and It is sometimes embedded into a high level language program to carry out specific hardware tasks or to speed up parts of the high level program that are executed frequently.

OBJECTIVE OF ASSEMBLY LANGUAGE

An assembly language is a programming language whose data structure correspond to the physical structure of the register and main store of its host computer and whose instructions are closely related to the machine instructions of the computer.

The major objective of an assembly language is to simplify the programming of a particular computer while still enabling the programmer to control the hardware of the computer directly.

Assembly language overcome many difficulties of machine language because machine language is slow, difficult to write and difficult to understand

THE NEED FOR ASSEMBLY LANGUAGE

There is need for programmers to understand assembly language because there is availability of a very good quality compilers for assembly language.

a.      Programmers may need to program directly in assembly language in order to meet constraints in execution speed or space (e.g writing games for micros and arcade machines).

b.      Code that must interact directly with the hardware i.e. direct hardware manipulation.

c.       Situations where no high level language exists on a new or specialized processor.

A good programmer can typically tweak and tune an assembly language program to run significantly better than the code generated by even the best compilers.

Assembly languages were once widely used for all sorts of programming and it is used in the writing of system software( operating systems and language translation programs), programming of micro-computers and most computer games.