Sunday, January 9, 2011

Stuff you don’t need to know about language levels

Programming languages have different levels, depending on how much they resemble human languages. Programming languages that use common  words  and  are  relatively  easy  for most folks to read and study are called highlevel  languages.  The  opposite  of  those  are low-level  languages,  which  are  not  easy  to read or study.

High-level languages include the popular BASIC programming  language  as  well  as  other  lan­guages that just aren’t that popular any more.BASIC reads almost like English, and all its com­mands and instructions are English words — or at least English words missing a few vowels or severely disobeying the laws of spelling.

The lowest of the low-level programming lan­guages is machine language. That language is the  actual  primitive  grunts  and  groans  of  the
microprocessor itself. Machine language con­sists  of  numbers  and  codes  that  the  micro­processor understands and executes. Therefore,
no one really writes programs in machine lan­guage;  rather,  they  use  assembly  language, which is one step above the low-level machine language  because  the  grunts  and  groans  are spelled out rather than entered as raw numbers.

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Why would anyone use a low-level language when high-level languages exist? Speed! Pro­grams written in low-level languages run as fast
as the computer can run them, often many times faster than their high-level counterparts. Plus, the size of the program is smaller. A program
written in Visual Basic may be 34K in size, but the same program written in assembly language may be 896 bytes long. On the other hand, the
time it takes to develop an assembly language program is much longer than it would take to write the same program in a higher-level lan­guage. It’s a trade-off.

The C programming language is considered a mid-level language. It has parts that are lowlevel grunting and squawking, and also many high-level parts that read like any sentence in a Michael Crichton novel, but with more charac­ter development. In C, you get the best of the high-level  programming  languages  and  the speed of development they offer, and you also get the compact program size and speed of a low-level language. That’s why C is so bitchen.

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