Low-level programming language: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 03:45, 8 September 2020

Revision as of 03:45, 8 September 2020

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==Assembly language==

Second-generation languages provide one abstraction level on top of the machine code. In the early days of coding on computers like the [[TX-0]] and [[PDP-1]], the first thing MIT hackers did was to write assemblers.<ref>{{cite book|last=Levy|first=Stephen|year=1994|title=Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution|title-link=Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution|publisher=Penguin Books|p=32|ISBN=0-14-100051-1}}</ref>

[[Assembly language]] has little [[Semantics (computer science)|semantics]] or formal specification, being only a mapping of human-readable symbols, including symbolic addresses, to [[opcode]]s, [[memory address|addresses]], numeric constants, [[string (computer science)|strings]] and so on. Typically, one [[machine instruction (computing)|machine instruction]] is represented as one line of assembly code. Assemblers produce [[object file]]s that can [[linker (computing)|link]] with other object files or be [[loader (computing)|loaded]] on their own.