Assembler (computer programming)

Assembly language

Motorola MC6800 Assembly listing, showing original assembly language and the assembled form
Paradigm	Imperative, Unstructured
First appeared	1949; 68 years ago (1949)

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 opcode, 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.