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### 1.2 The GNU Assembler

GNU `as` is really a family of assemblers. If you use (or have used) the GNU assembler on one architecture, you should find a fairly similar environment when you use it on another architecture. Each version has much in common with the others, including object file formats, most assembler directives (often called pseudo-ops) and assembler syntax.

`as` is primarily intended to assemble the output of the GNU C compiler `gcc` for use by the linker `ld`. Nevertheless, we’ve tried to make `as` assemble correctly everything that other assemblers for the same machine would assemble. Any exceptions are documented explicitly (see Machine Dependencies). This doesn’t mean `as` always uses the same syntax as another assembler for the same architecture; for example, we know of several incompatible versions of 680x0 assembly language syntax.

Unlike older assemblers, `as` is designed to assemble a source program in one pass of the source file. This has a subtle impact on the `.org` directive (see `.org`).