6.4 Assembly Language
As we pointed out in Chapter 1, the first tools developed to help the programmer were assembly languages. Assembly languages assign mnemonic letter codes to each machine-language instruction. The programmer uses these mnemonics in place of binary or hex digits. Programming using mnemonics instead of directly in machine language makes the programmer more efficient and the process less error prone. After all, it’s much easier to remember the mnemonic ADDA (to add a value to the A register) than it is the opcode 0110.
Ultimately, though, every program that is executed on a computer eventually must be in the form of the computer’s machine language. So, we use a program called an assembler to read each of the instructions ...
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