Why assembly language

Natural language processing NLP is the ability of a computer program to understand spoken and written human language. NLP programming automates the translation process between computers and humans by manipulating unstructured data words in the context of a specific task conversation. View Full Term. By clicking sign up, you agree to receive emails from Techopedia and agree to our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. An assembly language , also known as an assembler language, is a low-level programming language.

Therefore, different machines have different assembly languages. This type of language makes use of symbols to represent an operation or instruction.

Hence, it is also often known as symbolic machine code. These days, assembly language makes it possible to manipulate hardware directly, address critical issues concerning performance and also provide access to special instructions for processors. Uses of assembly language include coding device drivers, real-time systems, low-level embedded systems, boot codes, reverse engineering and more.

The following are some of the reasons why learning assembly language is still important and relevant. A processor understands only machine language instructions, which are strings of 1's and 0's. However, machine language is too obscure and complex for using in software development.

So, the low-level assembly language is designed for a specific family of processors that represents various instructions in symbolic code and a more understandable form. The main internal hardware of a PC consists of processor, memory, and registers. Registers are processor components that hold data and address. To execute a program, the system copies it from the external device into the internal memory.

The processor executes the program instructions. The fundamental unit of computer storage is a bit; it could be ON 1 or OFF 0 and a group of 8 related bits makes a byte on most of the modern computers.

So, the parity bit is used to make the number of bits in a byte odd. If the parity is even, the system assumes that there had been a parity error though rare , which might have been caused due to hardware fault or electrical disturbance. 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. However, as new programmers worked their way into the system, without the benefits of having written several applications in assembly, the efficiency of software applications began to decline.

To reverse this trend, one of two things must happen: programmers must once again begin studying assembly language, or they must somehow pick up this low-level programming knowledge some other way. Learning assembly language still remains the best way to learn the basic organization of the underlying machine. Those programmers who take the effort to master assembly language become some of the very best high-level language programmers around.

Their ability to choose appropriate high-level constructs to produce efficient code, their ability to read disassembled high-level language code and detect heinous bugs in a system, and their understanding of how the whole system operates elevates them to near legendary status among their peers.

These are the programmers everyone goes to when they have questions how to implement something. These are the engineers who garner the respect of everyone around them.

They are the ones other programmers want to emulate. These are the programmers who write great code. The only problem is that, traditionally, most programmers have found it difficult to master assembly language.

Assembly is radically different than most high-level languages, so learning assembly language is almost as much work as learning programming from scratch. To someone attempting to learn assembly, it often seems as though none of their past programming experience is of any help.

All too often, an engineer learning assembly becomes frustrated with the fact that they know how to achieve a goal in a high-level language but they cannot figure out how to achieve the same thing in assembly.

As an instructor teaching assembly language for over a decade at the University of California, I was quite aware of the problems students have making the transition from the high- level programming paradigm to the low-level programming paradigm. While these new statements are definitely not true assembly language, they do provide a nice transition path from traditional, imperative, high-level programming languages to assembly. This lets the programmer learn assembly language programming in graduated steps rather than having to make the plunge all at once.

Nevertheless, these high-level control structures provide an excellent bridge between high-level languages and assembly language, allowing the student to leverage their existing high-level programming knowledge to learn assembly language.

Alas, there are few, if any, appropriate textbooks that teach assembly language programming using this high-level to low-level approach using the high-level control structures that MASM provides. A big problem that beginning assembly programmers face is that they typically need the ability to input and output numeric quantities or do numeric-to-string conversions and vice versa in order to write and test very simple programs.