5 ms·

isnt assembler a high level language nowadays?

• d_tr 3y ago
  Why would you think so? Assembler is what it has always been, i.e., mnemonics for machine instructions. Unless you are thinking about microcode, which is nothing new and I am not sure it should count as a "level" from the perspective of a programmer anyway.
  • semiquaver 3y ago
    By the standards of this article assembler on most architectures suffers from many of the same things that make C “not low level”: in particular it offers little control over cache hierarchy or coherency (modulo hint instructions like x86’s PREFETCH), nor instruction level parallelism. Of course, these aspects are entirely due to the fact that the dominant lingua-franca (C) has no ability to support these semantics. In large part the article argues that in most cases the abstract machines that ISAs describe differ so fundamentally from the reality of how code is executed on the underlying machine to make a truly low level language impossible to achieve.
• illys 3y ago
  Your question seems provocative... but that's a very good question. I've always liked assembly programming and I got very puzzled when I discovered the processor metal have gone very far from the x86 instruction set I was writing. Il felt like the magic was gone. Indeed there is no direct match anymore between instructions and gate combinations on the processor die. There is a microcode translating x86 instruction into whatever electronics are below. Change this microcode, and you could have your processor speak a different binary code (matched to a assembler language).