Typically a modern assembler creates object code by translating assembly instruction mnemonics into opcodes, and by resolving symbolic names for memory locations and other entities. The use of symbolic references is a key feature of assemblers, saving tedious calculations and manual address updates after program modifications. Most assemblers also include macro facilities for performing textual substitution—e.g., to generate common short sequences of instructions to run inline, instead of in a subroutine. Assemblers are generally simpler to write than compilers for high-level languages, and have been available since the 1950s. Modern assemblers, especially for RISC based architectures, such as MIPS, Sun SPARC, and HP PA-RISC, as well as x86(-64), optimize instruction scheduling to exploit the CPU pipeline efficiently. There are two types of assemblers based on how many passes through the source are needed to produce the executable program. One-pass assemblers go through the source code once and assumes that all symbols will be defined before any instruction that references them. Two-pass assemblers (and multi-pass assemblers) create a table with all unresolved symbols in the first pass, then use the 2nd pass to resolve these addresses. The advantage in one-pass assemblers is speed - which is not as important as it once was with advances in computer speed and capabilities. The advantage of the two-pass assembler is that symbols can be defined anywhere in the program source. As a result, the program can be defined in a more logical and meaningful way. This makes two-pass assembler programs easier to read and maintain. More sophisticated high-level assemblers provide language abstractions such as: * Advanced control structures * High-level procedure/function declarations and invocations * High-level abstract data types, including structures/records, unions, classes, and sets * Sophisticated macro processing * Object-Oriented features such as encapsulation, polymorphism, inheritance, interfaces See Language design below for more details. Note that, in normal professional usage, the term assembler is often used ambiguously: It is frequently used to refer to an assembly language itself, rather than to the assembler utility. Thus: "CP/CMS was written in S/360 assembler" as opposed to "ASM-H was a widely-used S/370 assembler."
