1. Introduction

Assembly language is a low level language that has been developed by chip makers to write instructions for a specific CPU.

We have discussed assembly language in general here. And also in detail here. And as a programming paradigm we have discussed it here.

The purpose of this section is to give you a practical demonstration of how assembly languages work, using a simplified version called the Little Man Computer, or LMC.

The LMC has a very limited instruction set, representing a basic Von Neumann computer. We will give you the list of instructions it is capable of carrying out, and demonstrate how these can be put together to form more complex programs.

When you are given questions on your exam about assembly language, you can assume that they will be using the LMC instruction set for their examples.