What is assembly language? What kinds of statements are present in an assembly language program? Discuss. Also highlight the advantages of assembly language.

What is assembly language?

Assembly language is a family of low-level language for programming computers, microprocessors, microcontrollers etc. They implement a symbolic representation of the numeric machine codes and other constants needed to program a particular CPU architecture. This representation is usually defined by the hardware manufacturer, and is based on abbreviations (called mnemonic) that help the programmer remember individual instruction, register etc. Assembly language programming is writing machine instructions in mnemonic form, using an assembler to convert these mnemonics into actual processor instructions and associated data.

Kinds of statements in assembly language

An assembly program contains following three kinds of statements:
1. Imperative statements: These indicate an action to be performed during execution of the assembled program. Each imperative statement typically translates into one machine instruction.
2. Declaration statements: The syntax of declaration statements is as follows:
[Label] DS<constant>
[Label] DC ‘<value>’
The DS statement reserves areas of memory and associates names with them. The DC statement constructs memory words containing constants.
3. Assembler directives: These instruct the assembler to perform certain actions during the assembly of a program. For example
START <constant> directive indicates that the first word of the target program generated by the assembler should be placed in the memory word with address <constant>.
 

Advantages

The advantages of assembly language program would be

• reduced errors
  
• faster translation times
  
• changes could be made easier and faster