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 architectures, but require interpreting or compiling. 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 instruction or operation. Typical operations require one or more operands in order to form a complete instruction, and most assemblers can therefore take labels, symbols and expressions as operands to represent addresses and other constants, freeing the programmer from tedious manual calculations.