Comment by jakewins

I mean, no, it's more than that.

You also need to choose optimal instruction encoding, and you need to understand how relocs work - which things can you resolve now vs which require you to encode info for the linker to fill in once the program is launched, etc etc.

Not sure why I'm on this little micro-rant about this; I'm sure Claude could write a workable assembler. I'm more like.. I've written one assembler and many, many parsers, and the parsers where way simpler, yet this thread is littered with people that seem to think assemblers are just lookup tables from ascii to machine code with a loop slapped on top of them.