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Comment by junon | Hacker News Reader

Most of the "this is assembly" is not what I'd consider assembly. Is compiled Lua bytecode "assembly"? If your answer is "no" (as is mine) then neither are java class files, C# IR, webassembly bytecode or most of what else this article calls "assembly".

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It's .NET IR, not C# IR, but I agree. If the bytecode is not executed directly by the CPU, if there's a separate translation layer to convert that to machine code, then a user-friendly presentation of the bytecode is not an assembly language.

Well, there is always the option to just pick a FPGA language and write an hardware implementation for them.

Most mainframes, like those from Xerox PARC, don't have any kind of Assembly, the first step of booting was to load the corresponding microcode execution engine.

Isn't x86 assembly not directly executed by the CPU? IIRC it's turned into microcode instructions. I could be wrong though

Yes

It’s turned into uops... by the CPU.

(And most instructions correspond to 1 or a few uops in a straightforward way).

The ASM (text) that you write is converted into machine code, and that is directly accepted and decoded by the hardware (which may turn it into Mops and uops internally, but that's an implementation detail!)

There is another fun one wich is Ada, there is a hardware implementation of it. So is it a assembly language? https://datamuseum.dk/wiki/Rational/R1000s400

It doesn't look like a hardware implementation of ADA, more like a computer optimized for running ADA programs.

That is, you still need a compiler, with optimization, register/stack allocation, etc... before you start outputting machine code that is run by the hardware. However all the tricky parts of ADA, the task model in particular, are implemented in hardware.

So it doesn't make ADA an assembly language.

Maybe FORTH and LISP could be considered assembly in some circumstances. I don't know enough about these and their machine implementation to be sure but it looks like there can be a 1:1 relationship between these languages and machine code.

No, because processors don't run ada directly.

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