Assembly Languages and Assemblers
Programming in machine language was simply too slow and tedious for most programmers. Instead of using the strings of numbers that computers could directly understand, programmers began using English-like abbreviations to represent elementary operations. These abbreviations formed the basis of assembly languages. Translator programs called assemblers were developed to convert early assembly-language programs to machine language at computer speeds. The following section of an assembly-language payroll program also adds overtime pay to base pay and stores the result in gross pay:
load basepayadd overpaystore grosspay
Although such code is clearer to humans, it’s incomprehensible to computers until ...
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