A high-level assembler in computing is an

assembler Assembler may refer to: Arts and media * Nobukazu Takemura, avant-garde electronic musician, stage name Assembler * Assemblers, a fictional race in the ''Star Wars'' universe * Assemblers, an alternative name of the superhero group Champions of ...

for

assembly language In computer programming, assembly language (or assembler language, or symbolic machine code), often referred to simply as Assembly and commonly abbreviated as ASM or asm, is any low-level programming language with a very strong correspondence b ...

that incorporate features found in a

high-level programming language In computer science, a high-level programming language is a programming language with strong abstraction from the details of the computer. In contrast to low-level programming languages, it may use natural language ''elements'', be easier to use, ...

. The earliest high-level assembler was probably Burroughs'

Executive Systems Problem Oriented Language The Executive Systems Problem Oriented Language (ESPOL) is a programming language, a superset of ALGOL 60, that provides abilities of what would later be termed a ''system programming language'' or ''machine oriented high order language'' (mohol), ...

(ESPOL) in about 1960, which provided an

ALGOL ALGOL (; short for "Algorithmic Language") is a family of imperative computer programming languages originally developed in 1958. ALGOL heavily influenced many other languages and was the standard method for algorithm description used by the ...

-like syntax around explicitly-specified Burroughs

B5000 The Burroughs Large Systems Group produced a family of large 48-bit mainframes using stack machine instruction sets with dense syllables.E.g., 12-bit syllables for B5000, 8-bit syllables for B6500 The first machine in the family was the B5000 in ...

machine instructions. This was followed by

Niklaus Wirth Niklaus Emil Wirth (born 15 February 1934) is a Swiss computer scientist. He has designed several programming languages, including Pascal, and pioneered several classic topics in software engineering. In 1984, he won the Turing Award, generally ...

PL360 PL360 (or PL/360) is a system programming language designed by Niklaus Wirth and written by Wirth, Joseph W. Wells Jr., and Edwin Satterthwaite Jr. for the IBM System/360 computer at Stanford University. A description of PL360 was published in earl ...

in 1968; this replicated the Burroughs facilities, with which he was familiar, on an IBM

System/360 The IBM System/360 (S/360) is a family of mainframe computer systems that was announced by IBM on April 7, 1964, and delivered between 1965 and 1978. It was the first family of computers designed to cover both commercial and scientific applica ...

. More recent high-level assemblers are

Borland Borland Software Corporation was a computer technology company founded in 1983 by Niels Jensen, Ole Henriksen, Mogens Glad and Philippe Kahn. Its main business was the development and sale of software development and software deployment product ...

Turbo Assembler Turbo Assembler (sometimes shortened to the name of the executable, TASM) is an assembler for software development published by Borland in 1989. It runs on and produces code for 16- or 32-bit x86 MS-DOS and compatible on Microsoft Windows. It c ...

(TASM),

Netwide Assembler The Netwide Assembler (NASM) is an assembler and disassembler for the Intel x86 architecture. It can be used to write 16-bit, 32-bit (IA-32) and 64-bit (x86-64) programs. It is considered one of the most popular assemblers for Linux. It was or ...

(NASM),

Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational technology corporation producing computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services headquartered at the Microsoft Redmond campus located in Redmond, Washingt ...

Macro Assembler Macro (or MACRO) may refer to: Science and technology * Macroscopic, subjects visible to the eye * Macro photography, a type of close-up photography * Image macro, a picture with text superimposed * Monopole, Astrophysics and Cosmic Ray Observat ...

(MASM), IBM's High Level Assembler (HLASM) for

z/Architecture z/Architecture, initially and briefly called ESA Modal Extensions (ESAME), is IBM's 64-bit complex instruction set computer (CISC) instruction set architecture, implemented by its mainframe computers. IBM introduced its first z/Architecture- ...

systems, Alessandro Ghignola's Linoleum, X# used in Cosmos and Ziron. High-level assemblers typically provide instructions that directly assemble one-to-one into low-level

machine code In computer programming, machine code is any low-level programming language, consisting of machine language instructions, which are used to control a computer's central processing unit (CPU). Each instruction causes the CPU to perform a ve ...

as in any assembler, plus control statements such as IF, WHILE, REPEAT...UNTIL, and FOR, macros, and other enhancements. This allows the use of high-level control statement abstractions wherever maximal speed or minimal space is not essential; low-level statements that assemble directly to machine code can be used to produce the fastest or shortest code. The end result is assembly

source code In computing, source code, or simply code, is any collection of code, with or without comments, written using a human-readable programming language, usually as plain text. The source code of a program is specially designed to facilitate the w ...

that is far more readable than standard assembly code while preserving the efficiency inherent with using assembly language. High-level assemblers generally provide information-hiding facilities and the ability to call functions and procedures using a high-level-like syntax (i.e., the assembler automatically produces code to push parameters on the

call stack In computer science, a call stack is a stack data structure that stores information about the active subroutines of a computer program. This kind of stack is also known as an execution stack, program stack, control stack, run-time stack, or ...

rather than the programmer having to manually write the code to do this). High-level assemblers also provide data abstractions normally found in high-level languages. Examples include:

data structure In computer science, a data structure is a data organization, management, and storage format that is usually chosen for efficient access to data. More precisely, a data structure is a collection of data values, the relationships among them, a ...

s, unions, classes, and sets. Some high-level assemblers (e.g.,

TASM Turbo Assembler (sometimes shortened to the name of the executable, TASM) is an assembler for software development published by Borland in 1989. It runs on and produces code for 16- or 32-bit x86 MS-DOS and compatible on Microsoft Windows. It c ...

and

High Level Assembly High Level Assembly (HLA) is a language developed by Randall Hyde that allows the use of higher-level language constructs to aid both beginners and advanced assembly developers. It fully supports advanced data types and object-oriented programmi ...

(HLA)) support

object-oriented programming Object-oriented programming (OOP) is a programming paradigm based on the concept of " objects", which can contain data and code. The data is in the form of fields (often known as attributes or ''properties''), and the code is in the form of pr ...

References

*

https://www.scribd.com/doc/7326575/Assembly-Language] (xiv+294+4 pages) (NB. Presents definitions and examples of older high-level assemblers.) * ''The Art of Assembly Language'', Randall Hydebr>

Webster site with information and links on HLA and assembler
Assemblers, *High-level {{comp-sci-stub