Interactive machine language programming

The problems of machine language programming, in the broad sense of coding in which it is possible to write each instruction out explicitly, have been curiously neglected in the literature. Granted that less than half of the binary instructions generated in the past year had their origin in assembly language, it remains likely that much more than half the instructions executed originated in this way. There are still many problems which must be coded in the hardware language of the computer on which they are to run, either because of stringent time and space requirements or because no suitable higher level language is available.