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assembly language

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assembly language

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Also known as asm, assembly, assembly code, assembler language

any low-level programming language in which there is a very strong correspondence between the instructions in the language and the architecture's machine code instructions

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Assembly language is a low-level programming language where each instruction corresponds very directly to the machine code that a computer's processor actually executes. It matters because it gives programmers precise control over what the computer does at the most fundamental level, though it requires detailed knowledge of how the specific processor works.

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Motorola 6800 Assembly Language.png
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Assembly languages
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1949-01-01
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In computing, assembly language (alternatively assembler language or symbolic machine code), often referred to simply as assembly and commonly abbreviated as ASM or asm, is any low-level programming language with a very strong correspondence between the instructions in the language and the architecture's machine code instructions. Assembly language usually has one statement per machine code instruction (1:1), but constants, comments, assembler directives, symbolic labels of, e.g., memory locations, registers, and macros are generally also supported.

The first assembly code in which a language is used to represent machine code instructions is found in Kathleen and Andrew Donald Booth's 1947 work, Coding for A.R.C.. Assembly code is converted into executable machine code by a utility program referred to as an assembler. The term "assembler" is generally attributed to Wilkes, Wheeler and Gill in their 1951 book The Preparation of Programs for an Electronic Digital Computer, who, however, used the term to mean "a program that assembles another program consisting of several sections into a single program". The conversion process is referred to as assembly, as in assembling the source code. The computational step when an assembler is processing a program is called assembly time.

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