Assembly little question

Question

When someone codes something for example in MASM, what is it called? Coding in assembly? What is it called when you look at the opcodes of some program debug part or when you dissassemble? What are their differences? I'm a bit confused.

Answer 1

"When someone codes something for example in MASM, what is it called? Coding in assembly?"

That's what I've always called it.

"What is it called when you look at the opcodes of some program debug part or when you dissassemble?"

If you're looking at the opcodes and converting back to assembly, then it's disassembling.

So, if I get your meaning, though I'm not sure that I do, the answer is that there are various activities that you're describing: Coding in assembly, which is writing the code in basically human-readable form, i.e., JMP 0405, LDA 5, etc. Assembling, which is running an assmebler on the human-readable form to convert it to a machine readable form, that is, the opcodes and along with their operands. There's disassembling, which is taking the opcodes and turning them back into the human-readable form.

Answer 2

When you write machine language using op-codes e.g ..

 MOV  SCON,#01010010B
 MOV  TMOD,#00100000B
 MOV  TH1,#0FDH
 SETB TCON.6

then you are coding in assembly language.

If you want to look at the assembly language used to create a program (either by a person writing in assembly language or a by a compiler) then you take either the binary file and feed it into a program called a disassembler. This converts the binary data the program consists of back into assembly language which you can understand (hopefully).

I hope that answers your question.

Answer 3

I will call it code in assembler, rigth. Anyway, it is strange to look directly at the opcodes as they're not intended to be human readable, usually you have a disassembler that transforms de opcodes to assembler instructions.

Answer 4

The act of writing code in assembler would be called "coding in assembly (langauge)". The result of writing code would be called "assembly language". Arguably, the result of disassembing during memory is assembly code, too, but clearly the assembly code you code is richer in detail (labels, comments, symbolic expressons) than the assembly code you get from a debugger, and thus is called "disassembly" to distinguish it.