Can someone explain assembly language to me?

Question

I’ve been googling what assembly language is/what its used for, but I don’t really understand what a lot of people are saying since I don’t have a compsci background and am fairly new. Can someone baby it down for me?

Answer 1

I'll try my best to simplify it.

You get low level languages and high level languages.

Assempler is a low level language. With a low level language you write code that is directly talking to the microprocessor. You are directly adressing registers and the like

With a high level language, your program is read by another program called a compiler or interpreter depending on the language and this is turned into machine code that gets executed by the hardware.

Answer 2

Assembly is basically a language that is extremely close to "machine code". It's designed this way for extremely precise hardware responses, usually. Kind of like a game controller or monitor screen.

Programming itself is really just creating complicated instructions for a computer to follow that is translated into machine code.

In the simplest possible terms, it's like programming something that processes instructions really, really fast. Or at least that's what it's supposed to do.

Answer 3

For programming in assembly language, you must know about algorithms and microprocessor. For programming in C, Pascal or C++, you must know about algorithms and a little of microprocessor. For programming in Java or C#, you must know only of algorithms.