What is an assembly language?
Q: What is an assembly language?
A: An assembly language is a programming language that can be used to directly tell the computer what to do. It is almost exactly like the machine code that a computer can understand, except that it uses words in place of numbers.
Q: How does a computer understand an assembly program?
A: A computer cannot really understand an assembly program directly, but it can easily change the program into machine code by replacing the words of the program with the numbers that they stand for. This process is done using an assembler.
Q: What are instructions in an assembly language?
A: Instructions in an assembly language are small tasks that the computer performs when it is running the program. They are called instructions because they instruct the computer what to do. The part of the computer responsible for following these instructions is called the processor.
Q: What type of programming language is assembly?
A: Assembly language is a low-level programming language, which means that it can only be used to do simple tasks that a computer can understand directly. In order to perform more complex tasks, one must break down each task into its individual components and provide instructions for each component separately.
Q: How does this differ from high-level languages?
A: High-level languages may have single commands such as PRINT "Hello, world!" which will tell the computer to perform all of those small tasks automatically without needing to specify them individually as you would need to do with an assembly program. This makes high-level languages easier for humans to read and understand than assembly programs composed of many individual instructions.
Q: Why might it be difficult for humans to read an assembly program?
A: Because many individual instructions must be specified in order for a complex task such as printing something on screen or performing calculations on data sets - things which seem very basic and simple when expressed in natural human language - so there may be many lines of code making up one instruction which make it hard for humans who don't know how computers work internally at such a low level to follow along and interpret what's going on within them.
