Assembler

Also see: assembly language

The term assembler refers to a type of computer program that is responsible for translating a source file written in an assembly language, into a file object that contains machine code, executable directly by the microprocessor.

Operation

The program reads the file written in assembly language and replaces each of the mnemonic codes that appear with its corresponding operation code in binary for the platform that was chosen as target in the assembler-specific options.

Types of assemblers

You can distinguish between two types of assemblers:

• Basic swarms. They are very low-level, and their task is basically to offer symbolic names to different instructions, parameters and things such as modes.

• 32-bit or high-level modular frames. They are assemblers that appeared in response to a new 32-bit processor architecture, many of them having backward compatibility able to work with programs with 16-bit structures. In addition to performing the same task as the previous ones, allowing also the use of macros, they allow the use of more complex programming structures typical of high-level languages.