EnthusiASM: A Tile-Based Visual Programming Language for High-Level Assembly

In this paper, a visual programming environment for the development of low-level and high-level assembly language programs is proposed, and is evaluated in the context of Green and Petre’s “Cognitive Dimensions” framework. The system acts as a code generator for a textual assembly compiler, and is designed to be flexible enough to accommodate any hardware architecture and operating system. As an implementation example, an interface prototype for the common 32-bit Intel Architecture is shown in this paper. In addition to low-level assembly instructions unique to each hardware platform, the language includes support for high-level assembly language programming structures such as conditional constructs, looping constructs and stack management.