Introduction to Types of Computer Language

1. Machine Language

The machine language is sometimes referred to as machine code or object code which is set of binary digits 0 and 1. These binary digits are understood and read by a computer system and interpret it easily. It is considered a native language as it can be directly understood by a central processing unit (CPU). The machine language is not so easy to understand, as the language uses the binary system in which the commands are written in 1 and 0 form which is not easy to interpret. There is only one language which is understood by computer language which is machine language. The operating system of the computer system is used to identify the exact machine language used for that particular system.

The operating system defines how the program should write so that it can be converted to machine language and the system takes appropriate action. The computer programs and scripts can also be written in other programming languages like C, C++, and JAVA. However, these languages cannot be directly understood by a computer system so there is a need for a program that can convert these computer programs to machine language. The compiler is used to convert the programs to machine language which can be easily understood by computer systems. The compiler generates the binary file and executable file.

Example of machine language for the text “Hello World”.

01001000 0110101 01101100 01101100 01101111 00100000 01010111 01101111 01110010 01101100 01100100.

2. Assembly Language

The assembly language is considered a low-level language for microprocessors and many other programmable devices. The assembly language is also considered as second-generation language. The first generation language is machine language. The assembly language is mostly famous for writing an operating system and also in writing different desktop applications. The operations carried out by programmers using assembly language are memory management, registry access, and clock cycle operations. The drawback of assembly language is the code cannot be reused and the language is not so easy to understand. The assembly language is considered a group of other languages. It is used to implements the symbolic representation of machine code which is used to program CPU architecture. The other name of assembly language is assembly code. For any processor, the most used programming language is assembly language.

In assembly language, the programmer does the operation which can be directly executed on a central processing unit (CPU). The language has certain drawbacks as it does not contain any variables or functions in programs and also the program is not portable on different processors. The assembly language uses the same structure and commands which machine language does use but it uses names in place of numbers. The operations performed using the assembly language is very fast. The operations are much faster when it is compared to high-level language.

3. High-Level Language

The development of high-level language was done when the programmers face the issue in writing programs as the older language has portability issues which mean the code written in one machine cannot be transferred to other machines. Thus lead to the development of high-level language. The high-level language is easy to understand and the code can be written easily as the programs written are user-friendly in a high-level language. The other advantage of code written in a high-level language is the code is independent of a computer system which means the code can be transferred to other machines. The high-level of language uses the concept of abstraction and also focus on programming language rather than focusing on computer hardware components like register utilization or memory utilization.

The development of higher-level language is done for a programmer to write a human-readable program that can be easily understood by any user. The syntax used and the programming style can be easily understood by humans if it is compared to low-level language. The only requirement in a high-level language is the need of compiler. As the program written in a high-level language is not directly understood by the computer system. Before the execution of high-level programs, it needs to be converted to machine level language. The examples of high-level language are C++, C, JAVA, FORTRAN, Pascal, Perl, Ruby, and Visual Basic.