Appendix B
Assemblers and Macro Processors
Assembly language is almost at the bottom of hierarchy of computer programming languages. It is specific to a particular family of processor, tedious to use, error-prone, but is still used for those pieces of software which requires full access to all the peculiarities of a processor. It is required to be used to implement CPU-specific functions in operating systems.
Assembly language is also used during a later step in a HLL compiler, specially to handle memory allocation function. Thus, an assembler is one of the phases of a typical compiler.
A very rudimentary version of assembly language is mnemonic machine language, where the op-codes of the processor are writable as mnemonics, rather than bit-patterns. ...
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