Assembly language

The OS cannot directly understand assembly language, so you need an assembler. Nasm is pretty good, from what I have seen. Although, it is worth noting that various things will be different between different assemblers.

A) Either you misunderstood your CS instructor OR
B) He should be fired this instant. Is he over 75? Might be a slightly valid excuse.

Here are a few links I found in 10 seconds on google (remember its your friend):
http://webster.cs.ucr.edu/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assembly_language (see External Links too)

Hope that helps.

Oh, btw, you need a compiler to compile your assembly code into something the computer can use.

Mike

You will need to compile your asm code using a suitable assembler like nasm, this will compile the source code into and executable for you.

You can't save a sourcefile of asm commands as an executable (i.e. .exe ) and expect it to do anything, it will need to be compiled.

EDIT: beaten again :)