You might have heard the terms "assembly language" and "machine code" but what do they mean? Let's find out.

Assembly languages are quite different between computers as is evident below, which takes 16 lines of code for the HP and 82 lines for the x86. This example changes Fahrenheit to Celsius.

A recent edition of [Babbage’s] The Chip Letter discusses the obscurity of assembly language. He points out, and I think correctly, that assembly language is more often read than written, yet… ...

What’s more, it is super useful to be able to read assembly from your high-level tools when something goes wrong. Of course, one of the problems is that each assembly language is different.

However, there is hardly any mention of Java and assembly language code working together. In an earlier article I showed how assembly language programs can be called from Java applications.

You might have heard the terms "assembly language" and "machine code" but what do they mean? Let's find out.