Guide to Multitasking Operating Systems:Index

machine language

The instructions which are recognized and executed by, the CPU of a computer. A machine language program is simply long sequence of 0's and 1's. The CPU will typically take a 32-bit string of 0's and 1's as an instruction. Since it is extremely difficult to write machine language programs directly, assemblers are used, in which the programmer uses mnemonics to symbolize the machine language instructions.

Typical Assembler Mnemonic:

MOV EAX,EBX     ;Move contents of EBX into EAX
Corresponding machine language instruction:
(wild guess...  get intruction formats and manually
  assemble the above instruction.)
  ...0110 1100 0101 0011...