Why is assembly language called "assembly"?
I was just watching the 1st video in the "Crockford on JavaScript" series.
In it, Douglas says,
". . . the first program to make programming easier was the assembler, and using something called assembly language. We don't know why its called assembly language. . . ".
Thoughts?
The most interesting answer I found on the subject suggest that the name of the language came as a result of the name of the program written to translate it to machine code.
Quora.com user David Gish, who stated:
"In the very early days of computing, programmers wrote code in binary machine instructions and entered it into the computer through a bank of toggle switches.
This was tedious, to say the least.
They could ease the pain somewhat by coding in octal (base 8) — translating between binary and octal is quite trivial — but the code still had to be entered in binary through the switch bank.
Editing the code was a nightmare.
Inserting an instruction meant changing the memory addresses of everything that followed it.
It was much easier to write and read the code in a symbolic form while working on it. Instead of laboring with memory addresses, symbols and labels were used and the step of translating it to binary machine code was deferred until the program was finished.
At this point the programmer would convert each symbolic instruction to its binary equivalent, which became known as “assembling” the program.
It wasn’t long before someone wrote a program to do the job, and naturally named it the “assembler.”
In a backward way, the symbolic instructions became known as . . . “assembly” code."
So, being the Etymologist that I am, it got me thinking about the idea that maybe the original term would have been more appropriately written as "assemblee" and defined as "that which is assembled".
This falls in line with terms very often used in the financial world:
"Payor" and "Payee" "Mortgagor" and "Mortgagee"
"Assembler" and "Assemblee"
