Comment by fsckboy

>you can raise software interrupts/exceptions

exception handling requires that some unrelated region of memory is initialized and intact and ready to do the right thing, whatever that is, and that region is outside the scope of your control, it belongs to the operating system or the the embedded ROM, and it may not have been laid out to take care of your case.

assembly/machine code is operating at a lower layer: "I don't know what larger thing I'm a part of, but I know I need to stop."