What is the need of assembler?

[Rajeev Singh]

I am learning assembler or say trying to learn. Assembler is difficult language to code. Since COBOL compilers can covert COBOL code into machine language, what is need of assembler?

[Robert Sample]

There are things you can do in Assembler that you cannot do in COBOL. For example, if you want to access a data set for which the record length is not known -- assembler can handle this but COBOL requires the record length be known at compile time.