Pros and Cons of Assembly Language

The following are a number of advantages / disadvantages of employing assembly language:

• Assembly Language offers more control over handling particular software andhardware as it permits you to study the addressing modes, instructions set, interrupts etc.
• Assembly Programming produces smaller, more compact executable modules: as the programs are closer to machine, you can be able to write highly optimised programs. This yields in faster execution of programs.

Assembly language programs are as a minimum 30% denser than same programs written in high-level language.  Main reason for this is that as of today compilers generates a long list of code for each instruction as compared to assembly language that generates single line of code for a single instruction. This would be true particularly in case of string related programs.

Instead assembly language is machine dependent.  Every microprocessor has its own set of instructions. So assembly programs aren't portable.

Assembly language has very few rules orrestrictions; nearly everything is left to discretion of the programmer. This gives lots of freedom to programmers in construction of their system.