Why is assembly language called a low level language?

Answer 1

x86 assembly language is crucial to be able to do any serious security or reverse engineering work. In addition, it allows one to write well optimized code. It also gives the opportunity to understand how things really work inside the computer, which is by itself very important if you want to become a competent programmer.

x86 assembly language is not very hard to learn. In fact, if you know basic math (The one that you learn in elementary school), you could learn it yourself.

I recorded an online video course for x86 assembly (paid) and exercises (Open source).

You can find it at the address xorpd dot net.

This course will teach you x86 assuming that you know nothing. It only assumes

that you know how to add numbers. (In base 10).

In the end of the course you will be able to write fully working x86 assembly

programs on the Fasm assembler over the Windows operation system.

xorpd.

Answer 2

It is called assembly language for no other reason than that the machine instructions are assembled from the source code using a program called an assembler. Assembly language does not need to be compiled or interpreted, unlike high-level languages which do.

Answer 3

Assembly language was developed as a means of generating machine code in a more human-friendly manner. Rather than having to remember the exact binary value associated with a specific operation code (opcode) or CPU register, easy-to-remember assembly language mnemonics and symbolic names are used instead. All numeric data can be entered in a choice of binary, octal, decimal or hexadecimal notion, while memory locations can be referred to by named variable.

The computer itself can perform the translation from the assembly language source code to the low-level machine code through a simple conversion program known as an assembler. Assemblers are extremely easy to write (even in machine code) because there is so little abstraction between the assembly language source code and the resultant machine code; it is a near 1:1 translation that requires nothing more than simple lookup tables to obtain the appropriate binary codes.

Assemblers are machine-dependant, as are the assembly languages processed by them. However, once you have just one assembler, you can easily use that to write assemblers for other machine architectures. As the use of assemblers increased, high-level languages began to appear, along with the compilers and interpreters required to convert these languages into machine code. High-level languages are the third and last generation of programming languages.

[Note that there is no such thing as a fourth or even fifth-generation language since all high-level languages are classified by their paradigm(s), not by some meaningless "generation" label that tells you nothing about the language's capabilities.]

With the advent of C, the need for assembly language decreased significantly. C is designed in such a way that you should very rarely need to "bang the metal" with assembly language. While there are some cases where hand-written assembly language can be more efficient than the machine code produced by C, most programmers use C to do the vast bulk of their low-level programming (because it is easier to work with), and output assembly instructions that can then be tweaked by hand. However, modern day compilers incorporate many of the optimisations used by assembly programmers, so the need to tweak code is diminished. By the same token, C++ (which primarily evolved from C) is designed such you should rarely need anything lower than C++. Everything you can achieve with C you can also achieve with C++, and often with even greater efficiency than is possible with assembly language alone. However, the option to tweak the assembly emitted by these languages is still there if required. Neither C nor C++ are the be-all-and-end-all of low-level programming, but they both alleviate the donkey-work required to produce robust and scalable machine code programs.

Answer 4

Assembly language is called a low level language because it generally takes more time and space to express an idea using it than with a higher-level language.