The claim that the .CODE directive must precede the .DATA directive in assembly language programming is false; the order of these directives is not strictly enforced by the assembler.
The statement that the .CODE directive must always occur before the .DATA directive in assembly language programming is false. In assembly language, the .CODE directive is used to declare the beginning of a section where the executable instructions will be written, whereas the .DATA directive is used to declare the beginning of a data section where variables and constants are defined. The order of these sections in the source code is not strictly enforced by the assembler, which means you can define data before or after the code, depending on the organization and readability requirements of your program.