Assembling

Assembling — an important operation of a computing system in which a set of instructions written by a human being is transformed into a set of electrical signals by a computer’s processor. This is done by software referred to as an assembler.

Assembling is known to be a crucial link between the machine language and high-level language so as to facilitate the processor and the memory to understand the instructions. The kind of assembler applied in the assembly process depends on the particular method of assembly which is based on the number of passes that the program makes over the source code so as to generate the machine code.

Assembly is one of the basic processes in computing in which assembly language codes that are written by human beings are converted into machine codes, which are electrical signals that a computer’s processor can execute. This translation is done by a specific software tool termed as an assembler. The assembling process is another important stage that makes connection between high level languages, which are more simplified and easily understandable by the users and machine language that is familiar to the computer hardware. Assembler converts assembly language to machine code to make the processor and memory to follow the instructions of the programmer in the right way.

The kind of assembler that is employed at the assembling stage is dependent on the assembly method and this can be grouped according to the number of times that the assembler goes through the source code. Single-pass assemblers are the ones that work on the code in a single pass and generate the machine code as and when an instruction is met. On the other hand, multi-pass assemblers work on the code in several passes which enable it perform rather intricate operations like forward reference and finally the optimization of the final machine code. The kind of assembler and the manner of assembly will be determined by the size of a code and the computing system to be used with the code, but nonetheless, assembly is that middle step between human language code and machine language code.