11.3 Assembly language programming
This section explores how the Watson Virtual Machine can be programmed at the assembly level. The assembly level is the lowest level at which human programmers normally interact with a machine. Assembly languages were developed in the 1950’s to free humans from having to program computers in their native machine languages of 0’s and 1’s.
While assembly languages were a great leap forward and are much easier to read and write than machine languages, such languages are still tied very closely to the underlying machine they were designed for. Thus, the assembly language you will learn in this section is specific to the Watson VM. However, since the Watson VM incorporates most of the features found in today’s microprocessors, learning to program a real machine – such as an x86 microprocessor – will be much easier after covering the basics here.