Assembly language

Assembly language (short form assembler) is a programming language which is a human-readable form of the machine's basic object code. Rather than being in binary (expressed in whatever base), it instead uses mnemonics to indicate the instructions (e.g. 'ADD'), along with other fields to indicate the operands for each instruction (e.g. 'SP').

A program called an assembler converts the source code to binary object code. Assemblers usually also provide for symbolic labels for locations, so that transfer-of-control instructions can give their destinations symbolically; in addition to being more readable, this also means that such instructions don't need to be modified as the program is changed (chaning the addresses at which their targets reside).

A more advanced program for writing in assembler is a macro assembler, which is an assembler enhanced to provide macros.