title: Are there any languages that talk straight to the hardware and that aren't assembly?
body: <p>Just wondering how the world of assembly works, and I was reading about the assembly language on <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assembly_language" rel="nofollow noreferrer">wiki</a> and this quote struck me:</p>
  
  <blockquote>
    <p>It implements a symbolic representation of the numeric machine codes and other constants needed to program a particular CPU architecture.</p>
  </blockquote>
  
  <p>I always thought assembly was a fixed language based on your CPU (with different compilers and languages based on said CPU) so that for your CPU you could only use this type of assembly to talk to your hardware.</p>
  
  <p>But based on that quote, there could be other languages that use other symbols to represent the same numeric machine code.</p>
  
  <p>So, are there any other languages that talk straight to the hardware that aren't assembly? Or am I getting it wrong?</p>