There's usually two portions to a machine code: the operation code (opcode), which is the instruction, and the operand(s), which is the datum or data that act on this instruction. This is literally writing the 0's and 1's, or, more commonly, their hexadecimal equivalents. Machine code: The lowest level of code.Low level languages use hardware-specific instructions to talk directly to the computer this way.Ī programmer can write a low-level source code in two ways:
An extraordinarily simple instruction might be "Take the number stored at memory address X and subtract it from the number stored at memory address Y, then send it to the printer located at hardware address Z". Hence, the earliest computer languages evolved to reflect how computers fundamentally worked. The computer uses these addresses to route data throughout itself. All of its constituent parts, from memory to modem to monitor to mouse, has an alphanumerical address associated with it. However, the way someone writes code can make knowing how the program is supposed to function either easier or harder, so there's also an artistic side to programming.Īt its heart, a computer is simply a giant calculator that computes arithmetic billions of times per second. It "makes mistakes" because of how the program was written, which is entirely up to the human who wrote the code. It's very, very rare a computer makes a mistake because it actually made a mistake. It should also be noted that a computer is more or less a Literal Genie. If there's something immediately wrong with the source file, the compiler, assembler, or interpreter will complain until it's fixed. Programs are written into source files, which can be compiled or assembled for later execution, or interpreted for execution right away. The ability to jump around in the program at will.Conditional statements that control the flow of the program.A computer language that's not a programming one is Markup Language, which only defines how something should look, but not what something should do.Ī programming language has four basic elements to it: Where it does this provides further distinction such as higher-level scripting languages. While there are other languages in computer science, the defining characteristic of a programming language is that it's used to implement algorithms.
As the name implies, it's the language you use to program the computer to do what you want. But if you give them something to do, they'll be able to do it really fast! But how do you tell a machine what to do? Here comes the programming language.
Yes, Microsoft Windows and macOS don't magically appear in the computer right from the factory. If you were to take computer hardware that was freshly built off the assembly line, put the components together into a fully assembled device, and tried to turn it on, it wouldn't do anything useful (if anything at all).
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