Assembly Abbreviations

Assembly language ( English assembly language ) is a low-level machine-oriented programming language . It is a notation used to represent programs written in machine code in a readable form . Its commands directly correspond to individual machine commands or their sequences. It is essentially platform dependent: assembly languages ​​for different hardware platforms are incompatible, although they may be broadly similar.

The assembly language allows the programmer to use alphabetic mnemonic operation codes, assign symbolic names to computer registers and memory at his own discretion, and also set addressing schemes that are convenient for him (for example, index or indirect). In addition, it allows the use of different number systems (for example, decimal or hexadecimal ) to represent numeric constants and makes it possible to mark program lines with labels with symbolic names so that they can be accessed (by name, not by address) from other parts of the program (for example, to transfer control).

It may also provide additional features to facilitate programming, such as macros , expressions, program modularization facilities . In this regard, it can be considered as autocode (see below), extended by the constructions of high-level programming languages.

The translation of an assembly language program into executable machine code (calculation of expressions, expansion of macros, replacement of mnemonics with actual machine codes and symbolic addresses with absolute or relative addresses) is carried out by an assembler – a translator program, which gave the assembly language its name.

In colloquial Russian, it can simply be called “assembler” (expressions like “write a program in assembler” are typical), which, strictly speaking, is incorrect, since assembler is a utility for translating a program from assembly language into the machine code of the processor. Instead of the phrase “assembly program” it is more correct to say “assembly program”.

The use of the term “assembly language” may lead to the misconception that there is a single low-level language, or at least a standard for such a language. Since the syntax of an assembly language program depends mainly on the architecture used , there is no single assembly language. When using the term “assembly language”, if it is not obvious from the context, it is desirable to specify the assembler for which architecture is meant.

List of Acronyms Related to Assembly