Absolute Beginner's Guide to Programming, Third Edition

Enter the Keyboard

Someone watching over the programming process got the brilliant, but today seemingly obvious, idea of attaching a keyboard to the computer. Instead of typing those 1s and 0s, the programmer could type names associated with each instruction in the machine language. Therefore, the previous few instructions might look something like this:

ADD A, 6
MOV A, OUT
LOAD B
SUB B, A
   :

These commands are cryptic, but they are a lot easier to remember than the 1s and 0s. The words are called mnemonics, which means the words are easy-to-remember abbreviations for the instructions. ADD A, 6 is a lot easier to remember when you need to add 6 to the value of a memory location named A than is 01000110.

Of course, the computer could not understand ...