What is "assembly language"

assembly language \assembly language\ n. 1. (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.

Note: 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.

Language \Lan"guage\, n. [OE. langage, F. langage, fr. L. lingua the tongue, hence speech, language; akin to E. tongue. See Tongue, cf. Lingual.]

1. Any means of conveying or communicating ideas; specifically, human speech; the expression of ideas by the voice; sounds, expressive of thought, articulated by the organs of the throat and mouth.

   Note: Language consists in the oral utterance of sounds which usage has made the representatives of ideas. When two or more persons customarily annex the same sounds to the same ideas, the expression of these sounds by one person communicates his ideas to another. This is the primary sense of language, the use of which is to communicate the thoughts of one person to another through the organs of hearing. Articulate sounds are represented to the eye by letters, marks, or characters, which form words.

2. The expression of ideas by writing, or any other instrumentality.

3. The forms of speech, or the methods of expressing ideas, peculiar to a particular nation.

4. The characteristic mode of arranging words, peculiar to an individual speaker or writer; manner of expression; style.

   Others for language all their care express.
   --Pope.

5. The inarticulate sounds by which animals inferior to man express their feelings or their wants.

6. The suggestion, by objects, actions, or conditions, of ideas associated therewith; as, the language of flowers.

   There was . . . language in their very gesture.
   --Shak.

7. The vocabulary and phraseology belonging to an art or department of knowledge; as, medical language; the language of chemistry or theology.

8. A race, as distinguished by its speech. [R.]

   All the people, the nations, and the languages, fell down and worshiped the golden image.
   --Dan. iii. 7.

9. Any system of symbols created for the purpose of communicating ideas, emotions, commands, etc., between sentient agents.

10. Specifically: (computers) Any set of symbols and the rules for combining them which are used to specify to a computer the actions that it is to take; also referred to as a computer lanugage or programming language; as, JAVA is a new and flexible high-level language which has achieved popularity very rapidly.

    Note: Computer languages are classed a low-level if each instruction specifies only one operation of the computer, or high-level if each instruction may specify a complex combination of operations. Machine language and assembly language are low-level computer languages. FORTRAN, COBOL and C are high-level computer languages. Other computer languages, such as JAVA, allow even more complex combinations of low-level operations to be performed with a single command. Many programs, such as databases, are supplied with special languages adapted to manipulate the objects of concern for that specific program. These are also high-level languages.

    Language master, a teacher of languages. [Obs.]

    Syn: Speech; tongue; idiom; dialect; phraseology; diction; discourse; conversation; talk.

    Usage: Language, Speech, Tongue, Idiom, Dialect. Language is generic, denoting, in its most extended use, any mode of conveying ideas; speech is the language of articulate sounds; tongue is the Anglo-Saxon term for language, esp. for spoken language; as, the English tongue. Idiom denotes the forms of construction peculiar to a particular language; dialects are varieties of expression which spring up in different parts of a country among people speaking substantially the same language.

n. (context computing English) 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.

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

An assembly (or assembler) language, often abbreviated asm, is a low-level programming language for a computer, or other programmable device, in which there is a very strong (generally one-to-one) correspondence between the language and the architecture's machine code instructions. Each assembly language is specific to a particular computer architecture. In contrast, most high-level programming languages are generally portable across multiple architectures but require interpreting or compiling. Assembly language may also be called symbolic machine code.

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 source code. Assembly time is the computational step where an assembler is run.

Assembly language uses a mnemonic to represent each low-level machine instruction or operation, typically also each architectural register, flag, etc. Many operations require one or more operands in order to form a complete instruction and most assemblers can take expressions of numbers and named constants as well as registers and labels as operands, freeing the programmer from tedious repetitive calculations. Depending on the architecture, these elements may also be combined for specific instructions or addressing modes using offsets or other data as well as fixed addresses. Many assemblers offer additional mechanisms to facilitate program development, to control the assembly process, and to aid debugging.