It is a very common need in areas such as binary translation, program analysis, and compilers to represent the low level assembly instructions in a more abstract semantic representation. This semantic representation is often referred to as an Intermediate Language or Representation (IL/IR). These IRs provide a standardized method of performing the same operations over many different types of architectures without having to write separate operations for every supported architecture. For example, an optimizing compiler can contain a single optimization procedure that operates on an IR rather than many procedures, each having to handle the quirks of the architecture they were targeting.
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