Assembly Languages

You may not have come across Assembly Languages and at the last count not many of our experts here at Tentacle know about it as well. So what is an Assembly Language and why is it important?

Back in the last 1940’s, the Electronic Delay Storage Automatic Calculator (EDSAC) had an assembler called Initial Orders. This ran on a language which was a type of low-level programming language that was intended to communicate directly with the hardware running it.

The main fundamental difference is that, unlike machine language, which consists of binary characters, assembly languages are designed to be readable by humans.

So why are they necessary? Assembly languages are like a bridge between the underlying hardware and the more common higher-level programming languages which modern software applications, such as Tentacle’s Glasgow based ThunderBolt platform, are developed.

Tentacle’s software developers must rely on various layers of abstraction that allow them to code their commands in a format that is more intuitive to themselves. Specifically, they will code in a “high-level language”, which utilises intuitive syntax such as whole English words and sentences. For instance, they use logical operators such as “If”, “Or”, and “Else” that are familiar to everyday language.

So although Tentacle developers spend very little time dealing with Assembly Languages, they nevertheless essentially rely on Assembly Languages to the overall functioning of their applications they develop.