HLA was originally conceived as a tool to teach assembly language programming at the college-university level.
The goal is to leverage students' existing programming knowledge when learning assembly language to get them up to speed as fast as possible.
Most students taking an assembly language programming course have already been introduced to high-level control flow structures, such as IF, WHILE, FOR, etc.
HLA allows students to immediately apply that programming knowledge to assembly language coding early in their course, allowing them to master other prerequisite subjects in assembly before learning how to code low-level forms of these control structures.
The book The Art of Assembly Language Programming by Randall Hyde uses HLA for this purpose.
In practice, many experienced programmers continue to use HLL-like statements in HLA, MASM, and TASM, long after mastering the low-level instruction set, but this is usually done to improve readability.
One can also create compile-time variables and constants (including structured data types such as records and unions).
Perhaps just as important, the HLA Standard Library allows programmers to write portable applications that run under Windows or Linux with nothing more than recompiling the source code.
Like the C standard library for the 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 interfaces (APIs) can serve for all operating systems that HLA supports.
The HLA Back Engine (HLABE) is a compiler back end that translates an internal intermediate language into low-level Portable Executable (PE), Common Object File Format (COFF), Executable and Linkable Format (ELF), or Mach-O object code.
In addition to translating the byte and relocatable address statements into the low-level object code format, HLABE also handles branch-displacement optimization (picking the shortest possible form of a branch instruction).