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Game Development Dictionary

Assembly Language

A low level programming language that uses hexadecimal values in the form of mnemonics. Each mnemonic corresponds to one or a set of instructions which is specific to the processor that the code is being written for. This means that assembly language is not very portable but is extremely powerful for optimizations. In fact many C/C++ compilers today come with inline assemblers for optimization. However unlike C/C++ and other higher level languages, which shields the programmer from a lot of what's going on, in assembly language the programmer must enter every instruction that the computer is to do. That also means that to write anything useful takes many more lines of code.