What does a assembly language code look like?

Answer 1

Machine language is all binary numbers, and will vary on different architectures. For example, on a 32 bit processor, instructions will come in the form of a sequence of 32 "1"s or "0"s, where maybe the first 5 tell the CPU which instruction is being performed (add, subtract, load memory into register, load register into memory, etc), if you are adding maybe the next 5 bits means register $eax, the next 5 bits could be register $ebx.

The actual instruction will look something like: 01101001011010001100110011001100

Answer 2

To humans, machine language is imagined as being a sequence of binary digits. The symbols we use to represent these digits are actually immaterial -- any two symbols will do -- however the digits 0 and 1 or notationally convenient as they allow us to treat computer code as a base 2 (binary) number and thus perform binary arithmetic and logic at the same level as the machine itself. Binary codes are also easily converted to and from base 4, base 8 or base 16 (or indeed any base that is itself a power of two), thus providing us with convenient shorthand notation that keeps us close to the machine level without being overly abstract. We can also convert to and from other non-binary bases, including base 10 (decimal), however these conversions add a much greater level of abstraction that takes us much farther away from the actual machine code. Nevertheless, humans "compute" numbers much more easily and naturally in base 10 than in base 2 and we're not always concerned with how the computer physically represents those values. But when we are, we must use the machine's "natural" language.

The computer, however, has no notion of numbers. They may be called digital computers, but the digital notion is only in how we humans perceive the instructions and data that make a computer perform the tasks we wish it to perform. The computer has no real intelligence of course -- it is just a machine. A complex machine but a machine nonetheless. It is not possible to say what the machine's instructions "look like" to the machine. That would be like asking what the state of a light switch would look like to a light bulb. The switch is either on or off and the bulb simply behaves accordingly.

The best way to think of a computer is as a machine that can be configured, where each configuration instructs the machine to perform a very specific but very minute amount of work, such as moving the contents of one CPU register into another register. These individual configurations may be extremely primitive, but when millions upon millions of such configurations are switched every second, some of which will result in a choice between two possible configurations depending on the result of the current configuration, we give the machine the illusion of intelligence. In reality it's just doing exactly what we told it to do, just as we tell a light bulb to light up by throwing a switch.

Inside the computer there are CPU registers which we can think of as being banks of switches. By setting these switches on or off we are configuring the computer, essentially telling it which specific task we wish it to perform at that moment in time. This, in turn, engages the appropriate circuitry to perform that particular operation.

The most important register is the instruction register (IR) which stores the current instruction. If we wish to invoke a move instruction, we place the instruction's opcode in the IR. If we assume the opcode is 88 decimal, that translates to the binary value 01011000. In other words we turn switches 3, 4 and 6 on and turn the rest off. The computer now knows it must perform a move instruction.

Of course the CPU registers are not a bank of switches that we can simply turn on and off like light switches. They are in fact an array of cells where each cell consists of a capacitor and a transistor. The capacitor can be rapidly filled or drained of a small electric charge by the transistor. Thus the transistor provides the means to switch the state of the capacitor which thus determines the state of the cell (on or off). However, a capacitor cannot hold its charge for very long thus in order for the computer to "remember" the state of its registers (as well as its RAM -- the working memory, caches and other volatile memory), those transistor must refill all filled capacitors before they drop below a certain level. Hence we have a refresh cycle that maintains the machine's state between each new configuration.

Answer 3

Machine language is the computer instructions in memory--the actual bits used by the machine hardware or microcode interpreter. To "look" at it, it has to be converted to a human-readable form. Often, it is printed as a sequence of hexadecimal numbers, usually tagged with the memory address. Sometimes it is processed by a disassembler program, which tries to translate the code into assembly language instructions and data. This is not always successful since in machine architectures that mix data and instructions, it can be difficult to determine which program areas are data and which are instructions.

Answer 4

a stream of binary numbers