Assembly Language

John Brian B. Ignacio

B.S. Computer Science Mapua Institute of Technology Tel. +63 2 3596260, +63 9175293681 Jb23_ignacio@yahoo.com.sg

ABSTRACT
This paper will have an introductory description and the main purpose of Assembly Language which explains that assembly language is one most powerful computer programming language available, and it gives programmers the insight required to write effective codes.

3. ASSEMBLY V.S. HIGH-LEVEL

[4]Assembly language is much tougher to program than high level languages. The programmer must pay attention to the machine and must have an intimate knowledge of the processor and the hardware in use. But high quality hand crafted assembly language programs can run much faster and use much less memory and other resources than a similar program written in a high level language. Assembly language programming also gives direct access to key machine features essential for implementing certain kinds of low level routines, such as an operating system, device drivers, and machine control. Assembly languages are close to a one to one correspondence between symbolic instructions and executable machine codes. Assembly language instructions correspond to individual executable machine instructions. Typically a single high level instruction is translated into several executable machine language instructions. High level programming languages are much easier for less skilled programmers to work in and for semitechnical managers to supervise. And high level languages allow faster development times than work in assembly language, even with highly skilled programmers. Programs written in high level languages especially in OOP are much easier and less expensive to maintain than similar programs written in assembly language.

Keywords
Programming, Machine, Language, Commands, Low-Level

1. INTRODUCTION
[1] Assembly Language is a low level programming Language, the opposite of C languages which has high level language. Assembly language is the representation of the machine to give some instruction; the assembler is responsible in reading/understanding the instruction to perform basic operations of the machine. Assembly language has a big difference with the high level language. One difference is the both data and program structures in assembly language are created by directly executing them on the hardware.

2. ASSEMBLY LANGUAGE
[2] Machine Language, is what the computer actually sees and deals with. Every command the computer sees is given as a number or sequence of numbers. Assembly Language, This is the same as machine language, except the command numbers have been replaced by letter sequences which are easier to memorize. Assembly Language is like programming the machine or tells the computer what to do. Assembly language is considered as lowlevel programming language, which means that it can only be used to do the simple tasks that a computer can understand directly. Assembly Language can compose many instructions to do just one task or action. In Assembly Language, one important factor is [3] mnemonic which each instruction can be written as a short word and it is used so that the programmer does not have to remember the exact numbers in machine code needed to tell the computer to do something.

4. USAGE OF ASSEMBLY LANGUAGE

Assembly Language is often used in writing the low level interaction between the operating system and the hardware, for instance in device drivers. Many compilers also render high-level languages into assembly first before fully compiling, allowing the assembly code to be viewed for debugging and optimization purposes. [5]Another common area of assembly language use is in the system BIOS of a computer. This low-level code is used to initialize and test the system hardware prior to booting the OS and is stored in ROM. Once a certain level of hardware initialization has taken place, code written in higher level languages can be used, but almost always the code running immediately after power is applied is written in assembly language.

5. SYNTAX
MOV, a data transfer instruction, copies a source operand to a destination operand. The MOVZX instruction zero-extends a smaller operand into a larger one. The MOVSX instruction sign extends a smaller operand into a larger register. The XCHG instruction exchanges the contents of two operands. At least one operand must be a register. The mnemonic "mov" represents the opcode 1011 which moves the value in the second operand into the register indicated by the first operand. The mnemonic was chosen by the instruction set designer to abbreviate "move", making it easier for the programmer to remember. A comma-separated list of arguments or parameters follows the opcode; this is a typical assembly language statement.

6. REFERENCES
[1] Introduction of Assembly Language, http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/A/assembly_language.html [2] Jeff Duntemann, Assembly Language Step-by-Step: Programming with DOS and Linux, Second Edition (2000) [3] Assembly, http://www.computernostalgia.net/articles/assembly.htm [4] Comparison of Assembly Language and High Level Language, http://www.osdata.com/topic/language/asm/asmintro.htm [5] Usage of Assembly Language, http://www.computernostalgia.net/articles/assembly.htm