·
Computers only do what they are
told to do
·
Except in Hollywood movies, e.g.,
2001, Terminator 2, the Matrix, etc. ;-)
·
In order for a computer to
perform a task, it must be given a series of specific instructions in a
language it can understand
·
The fundamental language of any
computer is its machine language
·
This is typically sequences of
zeroes and ones
·
In the very early days of computers, this was the only way one could write programs!!!
·
To relieve the suffering of these
early programmers, a higher level language called assembly language was developed
·
Assembly language contains mnemonic words and symbols for the
binary machine instructions
·
An assembler maps assembly language instructions into machine language
instructions
·
Assembly language programming is
indeed a significant improvement over machine language programming
·
However, it has the following
drawbacks:
·
Machine dependent - each computer
architecture has its own unique assembly language
·
Low level instructions - writing
programs is very time consuming, tedious, and error-prone
