QMASM fills a gap in the software ecosystem for D-Wave's adiabatic quantum computers by shielding the programmer from having to know system-specific hardware details while still enabling programs to be expressed at a fairly low level of abstraction. It is therefore analogous to a conventional macro assembler and can be used in much the same way: as a target either for programmers who want a great deal of control over the hardware or for compilers that implement higher-level languages.