You are now entering the PC Anatomy portal

Assembly language is a low-level programming language that provides a symbolic representation of the machine code instructions a computer's CPU can execute directly. It acts as a bridge between human-readable code and the binary machine code that the hardware understands.

Key characteristics of assembly language:

Low-level: It offers direct control over the computer's hardware, including registers, memory addresses, and specific processor instructions.

Mnemonic-based: Instead of using binary (1s and 0s), assembly language uses human-readable mnemonics (e.g., MOV for move, ADD for add, JMP for jump) to represent machine instructions.

Platform-dependent: Each assembly language is specific to a particular CPU architecture (e.g., x86, ARM), meaning code written for one architecture will not directly run on another.

Assembler required: An assembler program translates assembly language code into executable machine code.

Direct hardware interaction: It is used in scenarios where direct manipulation of hardware, optimization of performance, or access to specialized processor instructions are crucial, such as in embedded systems, device drivers, and operating system kernels.