G. W. Gorsline
ABSTRACT
Among the early purposes of assembly languages must be included:
1) the use in the programming process of mnemonic operation codes and symbolic variables names instead of the bit patterns and relative addresses of machine code as an aid to the human programmer. Machine code programming has largely disappeared except as a temporary bootstrapping process in producing an early version of an assembler, a compiler, or an interpreter. We shall ignore it in this short note. Other reasons often cited as justification for employing an assembly language at the present time are:
2) the availability of all the machine resources and facilities,
3) the necessity of producing a program that executes as fast as possible,
4) the necessity of producing a program that is as parsimoneous of memory as possible, and
5) as the original bootstrap processor in producing compilers or interpretors for higher level systems and applications languages.
We wish to emphasize that these reasons were often valid in the past; that these reasons are sometimes valid at present; and that these reasons will remain valid only under very special circumstances in the future.
Index Terms
- Position paper on microprocessor assembly language draft standard IEEE task P694/D11
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