Why do you need assembly language?

Answer 1

Assembly language is more human-readable than machine language. Generally, statements in assembly language are written using short codes for the instruction and arguments, such as "MOV $12 SP", as opposed to machine language, where everything is written as numbers. Assembly language can have comments and macros as well, to ease programming and understanding.

Generally, programs called "assemblers" transform assembly language to machine language. This is a relatively straightforward process, there being a clear 1-to-1 transformation between assembly and machine language. This is as opposed to compilers, which do a complicated transformation between high-level language and assembly.

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ASSEMBLY is the key word to define the difference between Machine Language and Assembly. . Assembly language assembles steps of MACHINE CODE into SUB-ROUTINES defined by simple text words:

Such as: the assembly command 'ADD' may represents 20-30 machine commands.

Answer 2

Machine code requires that you enter instruction codes and their operands using a hex editor. View any executable in a hex editor to see just how difficult it would be to write machine code, never mind maintain it.

Assembly language replaces each instruction with a short mnemonic making it much easier to produce the machine code. Examine the disassembly of the same executable to see the difference this makes. The disassembly won't show the named code sections or variable names of course, never mind the comments used by the original programmer, but assembly programmers can make use of these to simplify their coding and make it much easier to maintain, none of which you get writing raw machine code.

These days, assembly language offers little benefit over a high-level compiled language which makes it much easier to produce highly-efficient machine code with very little effort.

Answer 3

Assembly language is used to facilitate speed and process operations that would otherwise be impossible in high-level languages. Programmers rely on assembly languages because the language allows them to use names instead of numbers.

Answer 4

Assembly language is useful in making efficient code that consumes less number of clock cycles and takes minimum memory footprint as compared to high level language. This makes ALP to be used designing software for memory and power constrained portable devices. It is also used in firmware design, real-time mission critical applications, device drivers etc.

Answer 5

Because some things you can write only in assembly especially when you work with hardware. Most assembly programs work significantly faster than, for instance, written in C any other high level language.

This is not because assembly is inherently "better" in some mystic way, but because assembly translates directly step-for-step into machine code, and it's possible for a suitably clever programmer to trim unneeded steps from the program. Actually, modern optimizing compilers are pretty good about this themselves; the speed advantage of assembly is relatively small compared to what it was in, say, the 1970s, and basically boils down to the ability to take short cuts by knowing that certain portions of the result of a calculation "don't matter", or because you know that it's literally impossible for certain results to occur so you don't need to bother handling those cases.

Answer 6

Assembly was the only language first available on computers, after "machine code." As systems became more complex, higher level languages were created to make it easier to program systems.

The main advantage of assembly language is that your code is placed verbatim into the binary executable file. In exchange for the complexity and tediousness of programming in assembler, you gain absolute control over your hardware, can accurately predict the storage usage and memory requirements of the application, and can ultimately optimize its speed and resource utilization.

Assembler is used primarily in cases where you'd like to exercise complete control over the hardware. This is primarily of use in embedded systems, such as cars, small electronic devices, etc.

Answer 7

Assembly language has only one role: to write machine-dependant code.