AIK, the Assembler Interpreter from Kentucky

Building an assembler is not all that hard, but it is not a trivial task and quite frequently it is a necessary evil. Over the past few decades, various “generic” assemblers and assembler generators have been developed to ease the burden. However, these systems still tend to be big and complex enough so that there is a significant learning curve associated with their use. In contrast, AIK is designed to be a simple, self-contained, tool that interpretively assembles according to a specification given in a very straightforward notation. An assembler is a program that converts human-readable machine-level instructions into their machine readable form. Although assemblers have been around for half a century, there are a few issues that still make it a pain to write an assembler – the worst of which is the issue of how to resolve forward references. The idea behind AIK is to make it easy enough to build an assembler so that typical undergraduate students will be able to experiment with their own assembly languages and instruction encodings... without needing any background in compiler construction. To achieve this goal, the input to Aik is actually in two pieces: the specification of the assembly language and the assembly language program (instructions) you wish to assemble.