ASSEMBLY
LANGUAGE
"Assembly
Language can be thought of as the most fundamental of all programming languages.
This is because there is a close correspondence between assembly language
statement and the actual operations that can be carried out by the CPU.
When you use assembly language, you have the exact and almost complete
control over every aspect of what the CPU does. The trade-off (yes,
there's always a trade-off) is that assembly language provides you with
little or no help in the form of prewritten functions that perform commonly
needed tasks such as disk access and screen display. The bottom
line is that you can do nearly anything you want by using assembly language,
but it is often devilishly difficult. Compared to programs written
in high-lvel languages, assembly language programs are smaller and runs
faster. Although you can use assembly language to write complete
stand-alone programs, it is much more common to use it to write subroutines
that are called by programs written in high-level language. In particular,
programmers turn to assembly language subroutines when the speed and flexibility
of assembly language are needed. Assembly language subroutines also
appeal to those programmers who need to build interface routines between
a high-level programming language and some of the sustem's BIOS or MS-DOS
services."