this post was submitted on 26 Aug 2023
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Okay, boomer here, be gentle.
So back in the ‘70s I dabbled in programming (now called “coding”, I hear). I only did higher-level languages like Fortran, Cobol, IBM Basic, but a friend had a job (at age 13!) programming in assembler. Is assembler now called assembly, or are they different?
It's still called programming, coding is the same thing. Assembler more commonly refers to the utility program that converts the assembly code to machine code while assembly refers to the code itself, but the term assembler code is also valid. It's uncommon to simply call the code assembler because it would be easily confused with the utility program.
Yep, some call it assembly, others call it assembler
c/suddenlyfactorial
Easier to say than "at age 6227020800"
I thought that the assembler is a specific program that translates mnemonics into the corresponding machine code. Perhaps in early computing this was done by hand so a person was the assembler (and worked in assembler), but now that is handled by software (and supports various macros). So programming in assembly would generate a stream of text that must be assembled by an assembler. (Although I have heard people refer to programming in assembler as well, just not often.)
I hear people say "program in assembler" but IMO that's wrong. I'd say you write the code in "assembly language" (or better yet, the actual architecture you're using like "x86 assembly") but you "assemble" it with an "assembler". Kind of like how you could write a program in the "C language" and "compile" it with a "compiler"
A compiler and an assembler do wildly different things though. An assembler simply replaces mnemonics while a compiler transfers instructions to a whole other language.
Depends on the language, really... C maps pretty closely to assembly language, it's not as simple as one mnemonic to one machine code byte, more like tokens get mapped to sequences of machine code, a function call translates to some code that sets up a stack frame, a return tears it down...
I was too young/poor to afford an assembler for my 6502 so I wore out the assembly long hand on a legal pad and then manually converted each operation to machine code.
Needless to say my programs done this way were exceptionally simple, but it’s interesting to understand the underlying code.