[citation needed] PASM is the lowest level assembly language in the Parrot stack.
The Parrot intermediate representation (PIR) is PASM extended to simplify development of compilers.
The main exceptions to this low level programming in PASM are string handling and, as shown above, input and output.
Additionally, PASM has automatic garbage collection from the virtual machine, and it does not allow pointer arithmetic.
This is because the marginal cost of creating a new instruction in Parrot is low compared to the marginal cost of doing so in hardware, and the creators of Parrot had no particular goal of minimalism.