Assembly language

Assembly language or simply assembly is a human-readable notation for the machine language that a specific computer architecture uses. Machine language, a pattern of bits encoding machine operations, is made readable by replacing the raw values with symbols called mnemonics.

Assembly language directives

In addition to codes for machine instructions, assembly languages have extra directives for assembling blocks of data, and assigning address locations for instructions or code.

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They usually have a simple symbolic capability for defining values as symbolic expressions which are evaluated at assembly time, making it possible to write code that is easier to read and understand.

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Like most computer languages, comments can be added to the source code; these often provide useful additional information to human readers of the code but are ignored by the assembler and so may be used freely.

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They also usually have an embedded macro language to make it easier to generate complex pieces of code or data.

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In practice, the absence of comments and the replacement of symbols with actual numbers makes the human interpretation of disassembled code considerably more difficult than the original source would be.

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