zlacker

A purist might prefer to say that it needs to be "assembled" and that "disassembly" is prohibited; but I don't think many people these days would quibble that the assembler -> machine code process isn't "compiling".

Assembly language is still a textual, human-friendly language where you can give memory locations symbolic names, you use mnemonics for the different machine instructions, many assemblers have various forms of macro support, etc. That all gets "assembled" or "compiled" into the machine code.