Just wondering how the world of assembly works, and I was reading about the assembly language on wiki and this quote struck me:
It implements a symbolic representation of the numeric machine codes and other constants needed to program a particular CPU architecture.
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.
But based on that quote, there could be other languages that use other symbols to represent the same numeric machine code.
So, are there any other languages that talk straight to the hardware that aren't assembly? Or am I getting it wrong?
You are getting it wrong (or possibly right - it's difficult to tell from your question). Assembly language is a symbolic (easy for humans to read) representation of the binary patterns of instructions for a particular CP architecture. One does occasionally come across references to "portabe assembler" (Scott Nudds, anyone?) but these are really slightly higher level languages.