Timeline for Why are assemblers called assemblers?
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
13 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Jan 28 at 19:09 | comment | added | Miss Understands | Yeah, but the question wasn't about compilers, it was about assemblers. I used to feed them a lifetime ago. | |
| Jan 25 at 3:59 | comment | added | user15022 | Strange, the change from translate to compile. In common usage, the latter, like assemble, is to bring together things that already exist (like compiling a list of sci-fi authors). | |
| Jan 21 at 16:58 | comment | added | gatkin | I agree with your doubt regarding the premise of the question, so I'm +1 even though I'm thinking about composing my own answer. | |
| Oct 6, 2024 at 13:12 | comment | added | hippietrail | @WillHartung I was also going to comment that the use of "assemble" here is what we know refer to as "linking". In fact I think I just read that said on this or another Stack Exchange thread on a related topic. I'd also remind as I also just read that the first assembly languages didn't look as they now do with mnemonic instructions but looked more mathematical. Both the terms and the concepts become fuzzy as we peer into the primordial era of programming. | |
| Jul 2, 2022 at 23:05 | comment | added | Will Hartung | To be fair, when it says it "assembles", there's nothing given that says that the intermediate forms fed into the assembler are actually mnemonic machine instructions. The way I read "assemble" here is more akin to linking. That it has these disparate components of the program from all of these phases and it now "puts them together" into the final binary. Maybe there's more to suggest that it is, indeed, just running what we today consider an "assembler", but from the anecdote as presented, that's not clear. | |
| Jun 30, 2022 at 20:03 | comment | added | texdr.aft | There were earlier compiled languages before Fortran; see Knuth and Trabb-Pardo's "The Early Development of Programming Languages" | |
| Jun 30, 2022 at 16:54 | history | edited | John Skiles Skinner | CC BY-SA 4.0 | bold to highlight |
| Jun 30, 2022 at 16:52 | comment | added | Raffzahn | Interesting twist. I like it. | |
| Jun 30, 2022 at 16:48 | history | edited | John Skiles Skinner | CC BY-SA 4.0 | clarification |
| Jun 30, 2022 at 16:37 | history | edited | John Skiles Skinner | CC BY-SA 4.0 | summary |
| Jun 30, 2022 at 16:28 | history | edited | John Skiles Skinner | CC BY-SA 4.0 | grammar and clarification |
| S Jun 30, 2022 at 16:17 | review | First answers | |||
| Jun 30, 2022 at 16:57 | |||||
| S Jun 30, 2022 at 16:17 | history | answered | John Skiles Skinner | CC BY-SA 4.0 |