Assembly language

An assembly (or assembler) language, often abbreviated asm, is a low-level programming language for a computer, or other programmable device, in which there is a very strong (generally one-to-one) correspondence between the language and the architecture's machine code instructions. Each assembly language is specific to a particular computer architecture, in contrast to most high-level programming languages, which are generally portable across multiple architectures, but require interpreting or compiling. Assembly language may also be called symbolic machine code.

Assembly language is converted into executable machine code by a utility program referred to as an assembler. The conversion process is referred to as assembly, or assembling the source code. Assembly time is the computational step where an assembler is run.

Assembly language uses a mnemonic to represent each low-level machine instruction or operation. Typical operations require one or more operands in order to form a complete instruction, and most assemblers can therefore take labels, symbols and expressions as operands to represent addresses and other constants, freeing the programmer from tedious manual calculations. Many assemblers offer additional mechanisms to facilitate program development, to control the assembly process, and to aid debugging.