The instructions that a CPU fetches from memory and executes are not at all understandable to human beings. They are machine codes which tell the computer precisely what to do. The hexidecimal number 0x89E5 is an Intel 80486 instruction which copies the contents of the ESP register to the EBP register. One of the first software tools invented for the earliest computers was an assembler, a program which takes a human readable source file and assembles it into machine code. Assembly languages explictly handle registers and operations on data and they are specific to a particular microprocessor. The assembly language for an Intel X86 microprocessor is very different to the assembly language for an Alpha AXP microprocessor. The following Alpha AXP assembly code shows the sort of operations that a program can perform:
ldr r16, (r15) ; Line 1
ldr r17, 4(r15) ; Line 2
beq r16,r17,100 ; Line 3
str r17, (r15) ; Line 4
100: ; Line 5
The first statement (on line 1) loads register 16 from the
address held in register 15.
The next instruction loads register 17 from the next location in
memory.
Line 3 compares the contents of register 16 with that of register 17
and, if they are equal, branches to label 100.
If the registers do not contain the same value then the program
continues to line 4 where the contents of r17 are saved into memory.
If the registers do contain the same value then no data needs to
be saved.
Assembly level programs are tedius and tricky to write and prone to
errors.
Very little of the Linux kernel is written in assembly language and
those parts that are are written only for efficiency and they are
specific to particular microprocessors.