Before you ask why we use assembly language

[donkey]

It seems that many members first post on the forum is of the nature "Why do you still assembly language" or "Is assembly language still useful". In order to save you the time of typing the question I present an answer I gave in a recent thread, for other more insightful answers please be kind enough to search the board, they will not have changed much over the years so you can accept them as still relevant.

Here's my stock answer, note that I have tried to treat the answer as seriously as I can given my opinion of the question.

Most of us write in assembly because function names in other languages are too long and prone to spelling mistakes. For example the normal length of a mnemonic in assembly is 3 letters, allowing only limited unique combinations, much less prone to error than something like strcasecmp or even longer commands. Of course our good friends at Intel threw a wrench into the works with SIMD instructions, they are longer than 3 letters and for that reason virtually incomprehensible to your average assembly language programmer, who will gladly write 50 lines of code to perform the same task with 3 letter mnemonics rather than use a single SSE instruction like PMOVMSKB. Another reason for using assembly is that most assembly language programmers are grammatically challenged, a line like sbb eax,edx makes more semantic sense than something in NATURAL like DECIDE ON FIRST VALUE which would be unintelligible gibberish to him.

Hope this helps to enlighten you.