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Full Discussion: Why Assembly Language?
Top Forums Programming Why Assembly Language? Post 302580143 by Corona688 on Wednesday 7th of December 2011 04:19:07 PM
Old 12-07-2011
Quote:
Originally Posted by gabam
My question is that where does Assembly language stand today against the high level languages, I mean what can assembly do, that the other langues can't????

I hope you will explain your good points.
Thanks alot!
The most vital thing about assembly is that it's freestanding. It makes extremely few assumptions about the environment you're writing code for, and can create code which needs no operating system at all. That's what makes it almost impossible to get rid of.

When you're programming in assembly, all it amounts to in the end is "put these exact bytes in this exact location in memory" except you can give it instructions as well as bytes, and it does the conversion for you. That's precisely the kind of thing you need when writing a BIOS for example, when the computer does in fact start up blindly looking for its very first instruction at a very specific place.

You also need it to write a bootloader, which gets loaded from a hardcoded location on disk then blindly executed from, again, a specific spot inside that location.

You also need at least some of it to write an operating system. That gets loaded by the bootloader and, again, blindly executed starting from a very specific spot.

You don't get a nice, programmer-friendly environment where you can load whatever language you like to do whatever you please until after all these things have already happened. Even after that, assembly language is still useful.

The other thing about being freestanding is that, since machine code is executed by the host processor, there's no interpretation step. That's why you can write a better C compiler in C. C code isn't a program, it's a design which a C compiler uses to build a program out of raw assembly. You certainly couldn't write a better Perl inside Perl.

You can also write other languages in C. Name any language -- Perl, PHP, Java, C#, awk, Python, sh -- and chances are, it was written in C.

Last edited by Corona688; 12-07-2011 at 05:24 PM..
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Bio::Assembly::Singlet(3pm)				User Contributed Perl Documentation			       Bio::Assembly::Singlet(3pm)

NAME
Bio::Assembly::Singlet - Perl module to hold and manipulate singlets from sequence assembly contigs. SYNOPSIS
# Module loading use Bio::Assembly::IO; # Assembly loading methods $aio = Bio::Assembly::IO->new( -file => 'test.ace.1', -format => 'phrap' ); $assembly = $aio->next_assembly; foreach $singlet ($assembly->all_singlets) { # do something } # OR, if you want to build the singlet yourself, use Bio::Assembly::Singlet; $singlet = Bio::Assembly::Singlet->new( -id => 'Singlet1', -seqref => $seq ); DESCRIPTION
A singlet is a sequence that phrap was unable to align to any other sequences. FEEDBACK
Mailing Lists User feedback is an integral part of the evolution of this and other Bioperl modules. Send your comments and suggestions preferably to the Bioperl mailing lists Your participation is much appreciated. bioperl-l@bioperl.org - General discussion http://bioperl.org/wiki/Mailing_lists - About the mailing lists Support Please direct usage questions or support issues to the mailing list: bioperl-l@bioperl.org rather than to the module maintainer directly. Many experienced and reponsive experts will be able look at the problem and quickly address it. Please include a thorough description of the problem with code and data examples if at all possible. Reporting Bugs Report bugs to the Bioperl bug tracking system to help us keep track the bugs and their resolution. Bug reports can be submitted via the web: https://redmine.open-bio.org/projects/bioperl/ AUTHOR - Chad S. Matsalla bioinformatics1 at dieselwurks.com APPENDIX
The rest of the documentation details each of the object methods. Internal methods are usually preceded with a _ new Title : new Usage : $singlet = $io->new( -seqref => $seq ) Function: Create a new singlet object Returns : A Bio::Assembly::Singlet object Args : -seqref => Bio::Seq-compliant sequence object for the singlet seqref Title : seqref Usage : $seqref = $singlet->seqref($seq); Function: Get/set the sequence to which this singlet refers Returns : A Bio::Seq-compliant object Args : A Bio::Seq-compliant or Bio::Seq::Quality object _seq_to_singlet Title : _seq_to_singlet Usage : $singlet->seqref($seq) Function: Transform a sequence into a singlet Returns : 1 for sucess Args : A Bio::Seq-compliant object perl v5.14.2 2012-03-02 Bio::Assembly::Singlet(3pm)
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