by papa » Sat May 08, 2010 6:03 am
Assembly language is just a set of mnemonic symbols representing machine language codes. Therefore, it's just a very low level programming language intended to make program development easier for human beings. After the human programmer codes his assembly language source, he runs it through an assembler program to produce a machine language executable file. Since there's a one-to-one correspondence between assembly language commands and machine language codes, the only difference in performance is the additional assembler step that's required to prepare the assembly language source for execution.
Machine language and assembly language are unique for each hardware platform (CPU) and are not portable like high level languages.