It used to be called "Structured Assembly Language"; it had huge proponents in the 80s, even gurus who were trained in Pascal and Ada and wanted to take structu

It used to be called "Structured Assembly Language"; it had huge proponents in the 80s, even gurus who were trained in Pascal and Ada and wanted to take structure programming to the mainframe. On the PC, various assemblers added "high-level" macros; Turbo Assembler had .if, .while and .struct type macros. Even processor manufacturers where on the bandwagon; that's why the x86 has the ENTER and LEAVE instructions, to make function calls "trivial", at the risc of performance. In the 90s you had at least on academic (Randal Hyde) who wrote HLL, high-level assembly language, and along with it a very successful series of text-books on indented assembly. Anyhoo. On the x86 side at least, the Netwide Assembler was created by a bunch of volunteers, one of its initial goals was to remove high-level cruft and make assembly straightforward again. Personally, I think assembly is something best reserved for fun, one-off hacks, and inner-loops.