Editing High Level Assembly (section)

=== Standard library ===

The HLA Standard Library is an extensive collection of pre-made routines and macros (like the stdout.put macro described above) that simplify programming by preventing programmers from starting from scratch for each new application. Perhaps equally important, the HLA Standard Library allows programmers to write portable applications that run under Windows or Linux by simply recompiling the [[source code]]. Similar to the [[C standard library]] for the programming language [[C (programming language)|C]], the HLA Standard Library allows users to abstract away low-level [[operating system]] (OS) calls, so the same set of OS [[application programming interface]]s (APIs) can serve for all operating systems that HLA supports. While an assembly language allows making any needed OS calls, using the HLA Standard Library API set simplifies writing OS-portable programs.

The HLA Standard Library provides thousands of functions, procedures, and macros. As of mid-2010 for HLA v2.12, the library included functions in these categories (though the list changes over time):

* Command-line argument processing
* Array (dynamic) declaration and manipulation
* Bit manipulation
* Blob (binary large object) manipulation
* Character manipulation
* Conversions
* Character set manipulation
* Date and time functions
* Object-oriented file I/O
* Standard file I/O
* File system manipulation functions, e.g., delete, rename, change directory
* HLA-related declarations and functions
* The HLA Object Windows Library: object-oriented framework for Win32 programming
* Linked list manipulation
* Mathematical functions
* Memory allocation and management
* FreeBSD-specific APIs
* Linux-specific APIs
* MacOS-specific APIs
* Win32-specific APIs
* Text console functions
* Coroutine support
* Environment variable support
* Exception handling support
* Memory-mapped file support
* Sockets and client–server object support
* Thread and synchronization support
* Timer functions
* Pattern matching support for regular expressions and context-free languages
* Random number generators
* Remote procedure call support
* Standard error output functions
* Standard output functions
* Standard input functions
* String functions
* Table (associative) support
* Zero-terminated string functions