Assembly language

Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Assembly language
unstructured, often metaprogramming (through macros), certain assemblers are object-oriented or structured
First appeared1947; 77 years ago (1947)
Typing disciplineNone
Filename extensions.asm, .s, .inc, .wla, .SRC and several others depending on the assembler

In

macros[7][1]
are generally also supported.

The first assembly code in which a language is used to represent machine code instructions is found in

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,[9] who, however, used the term to mean "a program that assembles another program consisting of several sections into a single program".[10] 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.

Because assembly depends on the machine code instructions, each assembly language[nb 1] is specific to a particular computer architecture.[11][12][13]

Sometimes there is more than one assembler for the same architecture, and sometimes an assembler is specific to an operating system or to particular operating systems. Most assembly languages do not provide specific syntax for operating system calls, and most assembly languages can be used universally with any operating system,[nb 2] as the language provides access to all the real capabilities of the processor, upon which all system call mechanisms ultimately rest. In contrast to assembly languages, most high-level programming languages are generally portable across multiple architectures but require interpreting or compiling, much more complicated tasks than assembling.

In the first decades of computing, it was commonplace for both

application programming to take place entirely in assembly language. While still irreplaceable for some purposes, the majority of programming is now conducted in higher-level interpreted and compiled languages. In "No Silver Bullet", Fred Brooks summarised the effects of the switch away from assembly language programming: "Surely the most powerful stroke for software productivity, reliability, and simplicity has been the progressive use of high-level languages for programming. Most observers credit that development with at least a factor of five in productivity, and with concomitant gains in reliability, simplicity, and comprehensibility."[14]

Today, it is typical to use small amounts of assembly language code within larger systems implemented in a higher-level language, for performance reasons or to interact directly with hardware in ways unsupported by the higher-level language. For instance, just under 2% of version 4.9 of the Linux kernel source code is written in assembly; more than 97% is written in C.[15]

Assembly language syntax

Assembly language uses a

architectural register, flag, etc. Some of the mnemonics may be built in and some user defined. Many operations require one or more operands in order to form a complete instruction. Most assemblers permit named constants, registers, and labels for program and memory locations, and can calculate expressions for operands. Thus, programmers are freed from tedious repetitive calculations and assembler programs are much more readable than machine code. 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
.

Some are column oriented, with specific fields in specific columns; this was very common for machines using punched cards in the 1950s and early 1960s. Some assemblers have free-form syntax, with fields separated by delimiters, e.g., punctuation, white space. Some assemblers are hybrid, with, e.g., labels, in a specific column and other fields separated by delimiters; this became more common than column oriented syntax in the 1960s.

Terminology

  • A macro assembler is an assembler that includes a macroinstruction facility so that (parameterized) assembly language text can be represented by a name, and that name can be used to insert the expanded text into other code.
    • Open code refers to any assembler input outside of a macro definition.
  • A cross assembler (see also
    Motorola S-record
    ).
  • A high-level assembler is a program that provides language abstractions more often associated with high-level languages, such as advanced control structures (IF/THEN/ELSE, DO CASE, etc.) and high-level abstract data types, including structures/records, unions, classes, and sets.
  • A microassembler is a program that helps prepare a microprogram, called firmware, to control the low level operation of a computer.
  • A meta-assembler is "a program that accepts the syntactic and semantic description of an assembly language, and generates an assembler for that language",
    Sperry Univac also provided a Meta-Assembler for the UNIVAC 1100/2200 series.[18]
  • inline assembler (or embedded assembler) is assembler code contained within a high-level language program.[19] This is most often used in systems programs which need direct access to the hardware.

Key concepts

Assembler

An assembler program creates

subroutines
.

Some assemblers may also be able to perform some simple types of

CPU pipeline as efficiently as possible.[21]

Assemblers have been available since the 1950s, as the first step above machine language and before

Speedcode
as perhaps one of the better-known examples.

There may be several assemblers with different

TASM-syntax, ideal mode, etc., in the special case of x86 assembly
programming).

Number of passes

There are two types of assemblers based on how many passes through the source are needed (how many times the assembler reads the source) to produce the object file.

In both cases, the assembler must be able to determine the size of each instruction on the initial passes in order to calculate the addresses of subsequent symbols. This means that if the size of an operation referring to an operand defined later depends on the type or distance of the operand, the assembler will make a pessimistic estimate when first encountering the operation, and if necessary, pad it with one or more "no-operation" instructions in a later pass or the errata. In an assembler with peephole optimization, addresses may be recalculated between passes to allow replacing pessimistic code with code tailored to the exact distance from the target.

The original reason for the use of one-pass assemblers was memory size and speed of assembly – often a second pass would require storing the symbol table in memory (to handle

forward references), rewinding and rereading the program source on tape, or rereading a deck of cards or punched paper tape. Later computers with much larger memories (especially disc storage), had the space to perform all necessary processing without such re-reading. The advantage of the multi-pass assembler is that the absence of errata makes the linking process (or the program load if the assembler directly produces executable code) faster.[22]

Example: in the following code snippet, a one-pass assembler would be able to determine the address of the backward reference BKWD when assembling statement S2, but would not be able to determine the address of the forward reference FWD when assembling the branch statement S1; indeed, FWD may be undefined. A two-pass assembler would determine both addresses in pass 1, so they would be known when generating code in pass 2.

S1   B    FWD
  ...
FWD   EQU *
  ...
BKWD  EQU *
  ...
S2    B   BKWD

High-level assemblers

More sophisticated high-level assemblers provide language abstractions such as:

See Language design below for more details.

Assembly language

A program written in assembly language consists of a series of

machine language
instructions that can be loaded into memory and executed.

For example, the instruction below tells an x86/IA-32 processor to move an immediate 8-bit value into a register. The binary code for this instruction is 10110 followed by a 3-bit identifier for which register to use. The identifier for the AL register is 000, so the following machine code loads the AL register with the data 01100001.[24]

10110000 01100001

This binary computer code can be made more human-readable by expressing it in hexadecimal as follows.

B0 61

Here, B0 means 'Move a copy of the following value into AL, and 61 is a hexadecimal representation of the value 01100001, which is 97 in

MOV
(an abbreviation of move) for instructions such as this, so the machine code above can be written as follows in assembly language, complete with an explanatory comment if required, after the semicolon. This is much easier to read and to remember.

MOV AL, 61h       ; Load AL with 97 decimal (61 hex)

In some assembly languages (including this one) the same mnemonic, such as MOV, may be used for a family of related instructions for loading, copying and moving data, whether these are immediate values, values in registers, or memory locations pointed to by values in registers or by immediate (a.k.a. direct) addresses. Other assemblers may use separate opcode mnemonics such as L for "move memory to register", ST for "move register to memory", LR for "move register to register", MVI for "move immediate operand to memory", etc.

If the same mnemonic is used for different instructions, that means that the mnemonic corresponds to several different binary instruction codes, excluding data (e.g. the 61h in this example), depending on the operands that follow the mnemonic. For example, for the x86/IA-32 CPUs, the Intel assembly language syntax MOV AL, AH represents an instruction that moves the contents of register AH into register AL. The[nb 3] hexadecimal form of this instruction is:

88 E0

The first byte, 88h, identifies a move between a byte-sized register and either another register or memory, and the second byte, E0h, is encoded (with three bit-fields) to specify that both operands are registers, the source is AH, and the destination is AL.

In a case like this where the same mnemonic can represent more than one binary instruction, the assembler determines which instruction to generate by examining the operands. In the first example, the operand 61h is a valid hexadecimal numeric constant and is not a valid register name, so only the B0 instruction can be applicable. In the second example, the operand AH is a valid register name and not a valid numeric constant (hexadecimal, decimal, octal, or binary), so only the 88 instruction can be applicable.

Assembly languages are always designed so that this sort of lack of ambiguity is universally enforced by their syntax. For example, in the Intel x86 assembly language, a hexadecimal constant must start with a numeral digit, so that the hexadecimal number 'A' (equal to decimal ten) would be written as 0Ah or 0AH, not AH, specifically so that it cannot appear to be the name of register AH. (The same rule also prevents ambiguity with the names of registers BH, CH, and DH, as well as with any user-defined symbol that ends with the letter H and otherwise contains only characters that are hexadecimal digits, such as the word "BEACH".)

Returning to the original example, while the x86 opcode 10110000 (B0) copies an 8-bit value into the AL register, 10110001 (B1) moves it into CL and 10110010 (B2) does so into DL. Assembly language examples for these follow.[24]

MOV AL, 1h        ; Load AL with immediate value 1
MOV CL, 2h        ; Load CL with immediate value 2
MOV DL, 3h        ; Load DL with immediate value 3

The syntax of MOV can also be more complex as the following examples show.[25]

MOV EAX, [EBX]	  ; Move the 4 bytes in memory at the address contained in EBX into EAX
MOV [ESI+EAX], CL ; Move the contents of CL into the byte at address ESI+EAX
MOV DS, DX        ; Move the contents of DX into segment register DS

In each case, the MOV mnemonic is translated directly into one of the opcodes 88-8C, 8E, A0-A3, B0-BF, C6 or C7 by an assembler, and the programmer normally does not have to know or remember which.[24]

Transforming assembly language into machine code is the job of an assembler, and the reverse can at least partially be achieved by a disassembler. Unlike high-level languages, there is a one-to-one correspondence between many simple assembly statements and machine language instructions. However, in some cases, an assembler may provide pseudoinstructions (essentially macros) which expand into several machine language instructions to provide commonly needed functionality. For example, for a machine that lacks a "branch if greater or equal" instruction, an assembler may provide a pseudoinstruction that expands to the machine's "set if less than" and "branch if zero (on the result of the set instruction)". Most full-featured assemblers also provide a rich macro language (discussed below) which is used by vendors and programmers to generate more complex code and data sequences. Since the information about pseudoinstructions and macros defined in the assembler environment is not present in the object program, a disassembler cannot reconstruct the macro and pseudoinstruction invocations but can only disassemble the actual machine instructions that the assembler generated from those abstract assembly-language entities. Likewise, since comments in the assembly language source file are ignored by the assembler and have no effect on the object code it generates, a disassembler is always completely unable to recover source comments.

Each computer architecture has its own machine language. Computers differ in the number and type of operations they support, in the different sizes and numbers of registers, and in the representations of data in storage. While most general-purpose computers are able to carry out essentially the same functionality, the ways they do so differ; the corresponding assembly languages reflect these differences.

Multiple sets of mnemonics or assembly-language syntax may exist for a single instruction set, typically instantiated in different assembler programs. In these cases, the most popular one is usually that supplied by the CPU manufacturer and used in its documentation.

Two examples of CPUs that have two different sets of mnemonics are the Intel 8080 family and the Intel 8086/8088. Because Intel claimed copyright on its assembly language mnemonics (on each page of their documentation published in the 1970s and early 1980s, at least), some companies that independently produced CPUs compatible with Intel instruction sets invented their own mnemonics. The

V30 CPUs, enhanced copies of the Intel 8086 and 8088, respectively. Like Zilog with the Z80, NEC invented new mnemonics for all of the 8086 and 8088 instructions, to avoid accusations of infringement of Intel's copyright. (It is questionable whether such copyrights can be valid, and later CPU companies such as AMD[nb 4] and Cyrix republished Intel's x86/IA-32 instruction mnemonics exactly with neither permission nor legal penalty.) It is doubtful whether in practice many people who programmed the V20 and V30 actually wrote in NEC's assembly language rather than Intel's; since any two assembly languages for the same instruction set architecture are isomorphic (somewhat like English and Pig Latin
), there is no requirement to use a manufacturer's own published assembly language with that manufacturer's products.

Language design

Basic elements

There is a large degree of diversity in the way the authors of assemblers categorize statements and in the nomenclature that they use. In particular, some describe anything other than a machine mnemonic or extended mnemonic as a pseudo-operation (pseudo-op). A typical assembly language consists of 3 types of instruction statements that are used to define program operations:

  • Opcode mnemonics
  • Data definitions
  • Assembly directives

Opcode mnemonics and extended mnemonics

Instructions (statements) in assembly language are generally very simple, unlike those in high-level languages. Generally, a mnemonic is a symbolic name for a single executable machine language instruction (an opcode), and there is at least one opcode mnemonic defined for each machine language instruction. Each instruction typically consists of an operation or opcode plus zero or more operands. Most instructions refer to a single value or a pair of values. Operands can be immediate (value coded in the instruction itself), registers specified in the instruction or implied, or the addresses of data located elsewhere in storage. This is determined by the underlying processor architecture: the assembler merely reflects how this architecture works. Extended mnemonics are often used to specify a combination of an opcode with a specific operand, e.g., the System/360 assemblers use B as an extended mnemonic for BC with a mask of 15 and NOP ("NO OPeration" – do nothing for one step) for BC with a mask of 0.

Extended mnemonics are often used to support specialized uses of instructions, often for purposes not obvious from the instruction name. For example, many CPU's do not have an explicit NOP instruction, but do have instructions that can be used for the purpose. In 8086 CPUs the instruction xchg ax,ax is used for nop, with nop being a pseudo-opcode to encode the instruction xchg ax,ax. Some disassemblers recognize this and will decode the xchg ax,ax instruction as nop. Similarly, IBM assemblers for System/360 and System/370 use the extended mnemonics NOP and NOPR for BC and BCR with zero masks. For the SPARC architecture, these are known as synthetic instructions.[26]

Some assemblers also support simple built-in macro-instructions that generate two or more machine instructions. For instance, with some Z80 assemblers the instruction ld hl,bc is recognized to generate ld l,c followed by ld h,b.[27] These are sometimes known as pseudo-opcodes.

Mnemonics are arbitrary symbols; in 1985 the IEEE published Standard 694 for a uniform set of mnemonics to be used by all assemblers. The standard has since been withdrawn.

Data directives

There are instructions used to define data elements to hold data and variables. They define the type of data, the length and the alignment of data. These instructions can also define whether the data is available to outside programs (programs assembled separately) or only to the program in which the data section is defined. Some assemblers classify these as pseudo-ops.

Assembly directives

Assembly directives, also called pseudo-opcodes, pseudo-operations or pseudo-ops, are commands given to an assembler "directing it to perform operations other than assembling instructions".[20] Directives affect how the assembler operates and "may affect the object code, the symbol table, the listing file, and the values of internal assembler parameters". Sometimes the term pseudo-opcode is reserved for directives that generate object code, such as those that generate data.[28]

The names of pseudo-ops often start with a dot to distinguish them from machine instructions. Pseudo-ops can make the assembly of the program dependent on parameters input by a programmer, so that one program can be assembled in different ways, perhaps for different applications. Or, a pseudo-op can be used to manipulate presentation of a program to make it easier to read and maintain. Another common use of pseudo-ops is to reserve storage areas for run-time data and optionally initialize their contents to known values.

Symbolic assemblers let programmers associate arbitrary names (

GOTO
destinations are given labels. Some assemblers support local symbols which are often lexically distinct from normal symbols (e.g., the use of "10$" as a GOTO destination).

Some assemblers, such as NASM, provide flexible symbol management, letting programmers manage different namespaces, automatically calculate offsets within data structures, and assign labels that refer to literal values or the result of simple computations performed by the assembler. Labels can also be used to initialize constants and variables with relocatable addresses.

Assembly languages, like most other computer languages, allow comments to be added to program source code that will be ignored during assembly. Judicious commenting is essential in assembly language programs, as the meaning and purpose of a sequence of binary machine instructions can be difficult to determine. The "raw" (uncommented) assembly language generated by compilers or disassemblers is quite difficult to read when changes must be made.

Macros

Many assemblers support predefined macros, and others support programmer-defined (and repeatedly re-definable) macros involving sequences of text lines in which variables and constants are embedded. The macro definition is most commonly[nb 5] a mixture of assembler statements, e.g., directives, symbolic machine instructions, and templates for assembler statements. This sequence of text lines may include opcodes or directives. Once a macro has been defined its name may be used in place of a mnemonic. When the assembler processes such a statement, it replaces the statement with the text lines associated with that macro, then processes them as if they existed in the source code file (including, in some assemblers, expansion of any macros existing in the replacement text). Macros in this sense date to IBM autocoders of the 1950s.[29]

Macro assemblers typically have directives to, e.g., define macros, define variables, set variables to the result of an arithmetic, logical or string expression, iterate, conditionally generate code. Some of those directives may be restricted to use within a macro definition, e.g., MEXIT in

HLASM
, while others may be permitted within open code (outside macro definitions), e.g., AIF and COPY in HLASM.

In assembly language, the term "macro" represents a more comprehensive concept than it does in some other contexts, such as the

pre-processor in the C programming language, where its #define directive typically is used to create short single line macros. Assembler macro instructions, like macros in PL/I
and some other languages, can be lengthy "programs" by themselves, executed by interpretation by the assembler during assembly.

Since macros can have 'short' names but expand to several or indeed many lines of code, they can be used to make assembly language programs appear to be far shorter, requiring fewer lines of source code, as with higher level languages. They can also be used to add higher levels of structure to assembly programs, optionally introduce embedded debugging code via parameters and other similar features.

Macro assemblers often allow macros to take

This allowed a high degree of portability for the time.

Macros were used to customize large scale software systems for specific customers in the mainframe era and were also used by customer personnel to satisfy their employers' needs by making specific versions of manufacturer operating systems. This was done, for example, by systems programmers working with IBM's Conversational Monitor System / Virtual Machine (VM/CMS) and with IBM's "real time transaction processing" add-ons, Customer Information Control System CICS, and ACP/TPF, the airline/financial system that began in the 1970s and still runs many large computer reservation systems (CRS) and credit card systems today.

It is also possible to use solely the macro processing abilities of an assembler to generate code written in completely different languages, for example, to generate a version of a program in

job control language and utility
control statements.

This is because, as was realized in the 1960s, the concept of "macro processing" is independent of the concept of "assembly", the former being in modern terms more word processing, text processing, than generating object code. The concept of macro processing appeared, and appears, in the C programming language, which supports "preprocessor instructions" to set variables, and make conditional tests on their values. Unlike certain previous macro processors inside assemblers, the C preprocessor is not Turing-complete because it lacks the ability to either loop or "go to", the latter allowing programs to loop.

Despite the power of macro processing, it fell into disuse in many high level languages (major exceptions being C, C++ and PL/I) while remaining a perennial for assemblers.

Macro parameter substitution is strictly by name: at macro processing time, the value of a parameter is textually substituted for its name. The most famous class of bugs resulting was the use of a parameter that itself was an expression and not a simple name when the macro writer expected a name. In the macro:

foo: macro a
load a*b

the intention was that the caller would provide the name of a variable, and the "global" variable or constant b would be used to multiply "a". If foo is called with the parameter a-c, the macro expansion of load a-c*b occurs. To avoid any possible ambiguity, users of macro processors can parenthesize formal parameters inside macro definitions, or callers can parenthesize the input parameters.[31]

Support for structured programming

Packages of macros have been written providing

GOTO operations in assembly code, one of the main factors causing spaghetti code in assembly language. This approach was widely accepted in the early 1980s (the latter days of large-scale assembly language use). IBM's High Level Assembler Toolkit[33]
includes such a macro package.

A curious design was A-Natural, a "stream-oriented" assembler for 8080/Z80, processors[34] from Whitesmiths Ltd. (developers of the Unix-like Idris operating system, and what was reported to be the first commercial C compiler). The language was classified as an assembler because it worked with raw machine elements such as opcodes, registers, and memory references; but it incorporated an expression syntax to indicate execution order. Parentheses and other special symbols, along with block-oriented structured programming constructs, controlled the sequence of the generated instructions. A-natural was built as the object language of a C compiler, rather than for hand-coding, but its logical syntax won some fans.

There has been little apparent demand for more sophisticated assemblers since the decline of large-scale assembly language development.[35] In spite of that, they are still being developed and applied in cases where resource constraints or peculiarities in the target system's architecture prevent the effective use of higher-level languages.[36]

Assemblers with a strong macro engine allow structured programming via macros, such as the switch macro provided with the Masm32 package (this code is a complete program):

include \masm32\include\masm32rt.inc	; use the Masm32 library

.code
demomain:
  REPEAT 20
	switch rv(nrandom, 9)	; generate a number between 0 and 8
	mov ecx, 7
	case 0
		print "case 0"
	case ecx				; in contrast to most other programming languages,
		print "case 7"		; the Masm32 switch allows "variable cases"
	case 1 .. 3
		.if eax==1
			print "case 1"
		.elseif eax==2
			print "case 2"
		.else
			print "cases 1 to 3: other"
		.endif
	case 4, 6, 8
		print "cases 4, 6 or 8"
	default
		mov ebx, 19		     ; print 20 stars
		.Repeat
			print "*"
			dec ebx
		.Until Sign?		 ; loop until the sign flag is set
	endsw
	print chr$(13, 10)
  ENDM
  exit
end demomain

Use of assembly language

Historical perspective

Assembly languages were not available at the time when the stored-program computer was introduced. Kathleen Booth "is credited with inventing assembly language"[37][38] based on theoretical work she began in 1947, while working on the ARC2 at Birkbeck, University of London following consultation by Andrew Booth (later her husband) with mathematician John von Neumann and physicist Herman Goldstine at the Institute for Advanced Study.[38][39]

In late 1948, the Electronic Delay Storage Automatic Calculator (EDSAC) had an assembler (named "initial orders") integrated into its bootstrap program. It used one-letter mnemonics developed by David Wheeler, who is credited by the IEEE Computer Society as the creator of the first "assembler".[20][40][41] Reports on the EDSAC introduced the term "assembly" for the process of combining fields into an instruction word.[42] SOAP (Symbolic Optimal Assembly Program) was an assembly language for the IBM 650 computer written by Stan Poley in 1955.[43]

Assembly languages eliminate much of the error-prone, tedious, and time-consuming

first-generation programming needed with the earliest computers, freeing programmers from tedium such as remembering numeric codes and calculating addresses. They were once widely used for all sorts of programming. However, by the late 1950s,[44] their use had largely been supplanted by higher-level languages, in the search for improved programming productivity.[citation needed] Today, assembly language is still used for direct hardware manipulation, access to specialized processor instructions, or to address critical performance issues.[45] Typical uses are device drivers, low-level embedded systems, and real-time systems (see § Current usage
).

Numerous programs have been written entirely in assembly language. The

FORTRAN
and some PL/I eventually displaced much of this work, although a number of large organizations retained assembly-language application infrastructures well into the 1990s.

Assembly language has long been the primary development language for 8-bit home computers such Atari 8-bit family, Apple II, MSX, ZX Spectrum, and Commodore 64. Interpreted BASIC dialects on these systems offer insufficient execution speed and insufficient facilities to take full advantage of the available hardware. These systems have severe resource constraints, idiosyncratic memory and display architectures, and provide limited system services. There are also few high-level language compilers suitable for microcomputer use. Similarly, assembly language is the default choice for 8-bit consoles such as the Atari 2600 and Nintendo Entertainment System.

Key software for IBM PC compatibles was written in assembly language, such as MS-DOS, Turbo Pascal, and the Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet. As computer speed grew exponentially, assembly language became a tool for speeding up parts of programs, such as the rendering of Doom, rather than a dominant development language. In the 1990s, assembly language was used to get performance out of systems such as the Sega Saturn[46] and as the primary language for arcade hardware based on the TMS34010 integrated CPU/GPU such as Mortal Kombat and NBA Jam.

Current usage

There has been debate over the usefulness and performance of assembly language relative to high-level languages.[47]

Although assembly language has specific niche uses where it is important (see below), there are other tools for optimization.[48]

As of July 2017, the TIOBE index of programming language popularity ranks assembly language at 11, ahead of Visual Basic, for example.[49] Assembler can be used to optimize for speed or optimize for size. In the case of speed optimization, modern optimizing compilers are claimed[50] to render high-level languages into code that can run as fast as hand-written assembly, despite the counter-examples that can be found.[51][52][53] The complexity of modern processors and memory sub-systems makes effective optimization increasingly difficult for compilers, as well as for assembly programmers.[54][55] Moreover, increasing processor performance has meant that most CPUs sit idle most of the time,[56] with delays caused by predictable bottlenecks such as cache misses, I/O operations and paging. This has made raw code execution speed a non-issue for many programmers.

There are some situations in which developers might choose to use assembly language:

Assembly language is still taught in most

character set encoding, interrupt processing, and compiler design would be hard to study in detail without a grasp of how a computer operates at the hardware level. Since a computer's behavior is fundamentally defined by its instruction set, the logical way to learn such concepts is to study an assembly language. Most modern computers have similar instruction sets. Therefore, studying a single assembly language is sufficient to learn: I) the basic concepts; II) to recognize situations where the use of assembly language might be appropriate; and III) to see how efficient executable code can be created from high-level languages.[23]

Typical applications

See also

Notes

  1. ^ Other than meta-assemblers
  2. ^ However, that does not mean that the assembler programs implementing those languages are universal.
  3. ^ This is one of two redundant forms of this instruction that operate identically. The 8086 and several other CPUs from the late 1970s/early 1980s have redundancies in their instruction sets, because it was simpler for engineers to design these CPUs (to fit on silicon chips of limited sizes) with the redundant codes than to eliminate them (see don't-care terms). Each assembler will typically generate only one of two or more redundant instruction encodings, but a disassembler will usually recognize any of them.
  4. ^ AMD manufactured second-source Intel 8086, 8088, and 80286 CPUs, and perhaps 8080A and 8085A CPUs, under license from Intel, but starting with the 80386, Intel refused to share their x86 CPU designs with anyone—AMD sued about this for breach of contract—and AMD designed, made, and sold 32-bit and 64-bit x86-family CPUs without Intel's help or endorsement.
  5. ^ In 7070 Autocoder, a macro definition is a 7070 macro generator program that the assembler calls; Autocoder provides special macros for macro generators to use.

References

  1. ^ a b "Assembler language". High Level Assembler for z/OS & z/VM & z/VSE Language Reference Version 1 Release 6. IBM. 2014 [1990]. SC26-4940-06.
  2. ^ "Assembly: Review" (PDF). Computer Science and Engineering. College of Engineering, Ohio State University. 2016. Archived (PDF) from the original on 2020-03-24. Retrieved 2020-03-24.
  3. . Assembly language may also be called symbolic machine code.
  4. . Programming in assembly language has the same benefits as programming in machine language, except it is easier.
  5. . (NB. Use of the term assembly program.)
  6. ^ Kornelis, A. F. (2010) [2003]. "High Level Assembler – Opcodes overview, Assembler Directives". Archived from the original on 2020-03-24. Retrieved 2020-03-24.
  7. ^ "Macro instructions". High Level Assembler for z/OS & z/VM & z/VSE Language Reference Version 1 Release 6. IBM. 2014 [1990]. SC26-4940-06.
  8. ^ Booth, Andrew D; Britten, Kathleen HV (1947). Coding for A.R.C. (PDF). Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton. Retrieved 2022-11-04.
  9. OCLC 313593586
    .
  10. ^ Fairhead, Harry (2017-11-16). "History of Computer Languages - The Classical Decade, 1950s". I Programmer. Archived from the original on 2020-01-02. Retrieved 2020-03-06.
  11. Stack Exchange Inc. 2011-07-28. Archived from the original on 2020-03-24. Retrieved 2020-03-24. (NB. System calls often vary, e.g. for MVS vs. VSE
    vs. VM/CMS; the binary/executable formats for different operating systems may also vary.)
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Further reading

External links