Today we are very used to running a rich variety of operating systems and programs on our mobile devices, from Office on a Windows laptop to a game on our Android smartphones, we are accustomed to ...

An assembler is a type of computer program that takes in basic instructions and converts them into a pattern of bits that the computer's processor can use to perform basic operations. The assembler's ...

Machine code, also known as machine language or native code, is the elemental language of computers. It is read by the computer's central processing unit (CPU), is composed of digital binary numbers ...

The microcontroller’s CPU reads program code from memory, one instruction at a time, decodes each instruction, and then executes it. All memory content—both program code and data—is in binary form: ...

Once we’ve built a computer, the next step is to develop an assembly language and then an assembler that can assemble our programs. In my previous column, we introduced the concept of the big-endian ...

Compilers often translate source code for a high-level language, such as C++, to object code for the current computer architecture, such as Intel x64. The object modules produced from multiple ...

C-programmers who don’t have a mental model of what’s going on underneath their thin veneer of abstraction above assembly code are destined for trouble. In order to provide a convenient way to ...

Like a lot of kids growing up in the 1980s, Nintendo was a big part of my childhood. A game that stands out for a lot of us is the original Legend of Zelda. That game put you in a very large, 8-bit ...