626 Appendix A • Glossary
API An Application Programming Interface (API) is a program component that con-
tains functionality that programmers can use in their own program.
Assembly Code Assembly is a low-level programming language with simplistic, but
few, operations. When assembly code is “assembled,” the result is machine code. Writing
inline assembly routines in C/C++ code often produces a more efficient and faster
application; however, the code is harder to maintain, less readable, and sometimes sub-
stantially longer.
Big Endian On a big-endian system, the most significant byte is stor ...