1.1. What are Programming Languages?

A programming langauge defines a format for laying out ordered sets of intructions to be executed by a computer. Programming langauges can be sorted into three three categories: interpretted languages, compiled languages, and machine languages. Of these types only machine languages can be understood directly by a computer.

A machine langauge is the set of instructions that a computer's CPU (central processing unit) understands. All instructions and information are represented by numbers; very fast for computers, very hard for human brains to read or write. To ease the task of computer programming, people created easier languages called assembly languages. An assembly language is one which provides textual names for the available machine language commands. This, along with the fact that assembly languages allowed programmers to add spaces and tabs to their code, made assembly languages far easier to program with. Assembly code can then be fed to an assembler which translates it into the machine language of the target computer's CPU.

The use of assembly languages spread very fast, they became known as "second generation languages" but there was still two problems with assembly langauges. Firstly, each command does only a very basic task such as add two numbers or load a value from memory. Using these small commands was quite tedious. The second problem was much bigger. Programs written in an assembly language are bound to a particular type of CPU. Each type of CPU has it's own machine language and, therefore, it's own assembly language. The next task was to design a language that could be translated into the machine language of many CPUs.

These new machine independant langauges were known as "third generation" or "high-level" languages. Designed to be easy to read, these languages were made up of english words, basic mathematical symbols and a few punctuation characters. These languages allow simple statements to be expressioned concisely, for example, adding two numbers and storing the result in memory could be expressed as:

data = 10 + 200;

Load R1, 10
Load R2, 200
Addi R1, R2
Store R2, L1