EDUCBA

Home Software Development Software Development Tutorials Software Development Basics What is Assembly Language?

What is Assembly Language?

By Priya PedamkarPriya Pedamkar

What-is-Assembly-Language

Introduction to Assembly Language

Assembly Language is a low-level programming language. It helps in understanding the programming language to machine code. In computers, there is an assembler that helps in converting the assembly code into machine code executable. Assembly language is designed to understand the instruction and provide it to machine language for further processing. It mainly depends on the architecture of the system, whether it is the operating system or computer architecture.

Assembly Language mainly consists of mnemonic processor instructions or data and other statements or instructions. It is produced with the help of compiling the high-level language source code like C, C++. Assembly Language helps in fine-tuning the program.

Start Your Free Software Development Course

Web development, programming languages, Software testing & others

Why is Assembly Language Useful?

Assembly language helps programmers to write human-readable code that is almost similar to machine language. Machine language is difficult to understand and read as it is just a series of numbers. Assembly language helps in providing full control of what tasks a computer is performing.

Example:

Find the below steps to print “Hello world” in Windows

  1. Open the notepad.
  2. Write below code

global  _main
extern  _printf
section .text
_main:
push    message
call    _printf
add     esp, 4
ret
message:
db  'Hello, World!', 10, 0

  1. Save the file with any name example XYZ.asm; the extension should be “.asm”.
  2. The above file needs to compile with the help of an assembler that is NASM (Netwide Assembler).
  3. Run the command nasm –f win32 XYZ.asm
  4. After this, Nasm creates one object file that contains machine code but not the executable code that is XYZ.obj.
  5. To create the executable file for windows, Minimal GNU is used that provides the GCC compiler.
  6. Run the command gcc –o XYZ.exe XYZ.obj
  7. Execute the executable file now “XYZ.”
  8. It will show the output as “Hello, world”.

Why should you learn Assembly Language?

The learning of assembly language is still important for programmers. It helps in taking complete control over the system and its resources. By learning assembly language, the programmer can write the code to access registers and retrieve the memory address of pointers and values. It mainly helps in speed optimization that increases efficiency and performance.

Assembly language learning helps in understanding the processor and memory functions. If the programmer is writing any program that needs to be a compiler, that means the programmer should have a complete understanding of the processor. Assembly language helps in understanding the work of processors and memory. It is cryptic and symbolic language.

Assembly Language helps in contacting the hardware directly. This language is mainly based on computer architecture, and it recognizes a certain type of processor and its different for different CPUs. Assembly language refers to transparency compared to other high-level languages. It has a small number of operations, but it is helpful in understanding the algorithms and other flow of controls. It makes the code less complex and easy debugging as well.

Features

The features of the assembly language are mentioned below:

  1. It can use mnemonic than numeric operation code, and it also provides the information of any error in the code.
  2. This language helps in specifying the symbolic operand that means it does not need to specify the machine address of that operand. It can be represented in the form of a symbol.
  3. The data can be declared by using decimal notation.

Assemblers

The assemblers are used to translate the assembly language into machine language. There are two types of assembler are:

  1. Single-pass assembler: A single assembler pass is referred to as the complete scan of source program input to assembler or equivalent representation and translation by the statement on the basis of statement called a single pass assembler or one pass translation. It isolates the label, mnemonics and operand field of the system. It validates the code instructions by looking them up in a mnemonic code table. It enters the symbol found in the label field and addresses the text’s available machine word into the symbol table. This pass is fast and effective, and no need to construct the intermediate code.
  2. Multi-pass assembler: In this, an assembler goes through assembly language several times and generates the object code. In this last pass is called a synthesis pass, and this assembler requires any form of an intermediate code to generate each pass every time. It is comparatively slower than a single pass assembler, but some actions that can be performed more than once means duplicated.

Advantages and Disadvantages

Mentioned are some advantages and disadvantages:

Advantages

Below are the advantages:

  1. It allows complex jobs to run in a simpler way.
  2. It is memory efficient, as it requires less memory.
  3. It is faster in speed, as its execution time is less.
  4. It is mainly hardware-oriented.
  5. It requires less instruction to get the result.
  6. It is used for critical jobs.
  7. It is not required to keep track of memory locations.
  8. It is a low-level embedded system.

Disadvantages

Below mentioned are the disadvantages:

  1. It takes a lot of time and effort to write the code for the same.
  2. It is very complex and difficult to understand.
  3. The syntax is difficult to remember.
  4. It has a lack of portability of program between different computer architectures.
  5. It needs more size or memory of the computer to run the long programs written in Assembly Language.

Conclusion

Assembly language is very important for understanding the computer architecture and programs for the programmers. The programmers mainly used many other programming languages for application development and software, but assembly language is also important. It helps programmers to achieve a lot if they implement the assembly language. Assemblies contain a lot of metadata that is version number, localization details, and other product details. It is an important part and provided to the user after digitally signed.

If an individual wants to know how the system works and the processor as well, then assembly language is the one that solves the purpose. It helps in all aspects, from understanding the algorithm of the program to the processor working and registering the registers of the computer. It depends on individual choice with which language to continue.

Recommended Article

This has been a guide to What is Assembly Language. Here we have discuss the Features, Advantages, and Disadvantages of Assembly Language. You can also go through our other suggested articles to learn more –

  1. Is MySQL Programming Language?
  2. Is Python a scripting language?
  3. R Programming Language
  4. What is HDFS?