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Programming languages

Introduction

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Computers have to be given instructions that they execute step by step to perform the useful tasks we need them to do. Unfortunately, telling a computer what to do is difficult as they can only understand one language: machine language or machine code, which consists of strings of 1s and 0s.

Humans aren't very good at thinking in 1s and 0s, so computer scientists have created many different programming languages more suited to the human brain.

Assembly language is very similar to machine code but uses text commands called mnemonics to represent the binary codes. One command in assembly language is equivalent to one in machine code. For this reason it is classified with machine code as a low level language: as near to the way the CPU works as possible.

Computer scientists have invented other languages that are more like human languages, using words such as ‘if', ‘while', ‘print' and ‘until'. These are called high level languages, and allow us to express high level concepts like loops or conditional statements more clearly than in assembly language.

Different high level languages are designed for different purposes. Python makes manipulating character strings easy, for example, while C is harder to write but makes more efficient use of the computer's resources.

Assembly and high level languages allow computer scientists to produce and debug programs quickly, but they have to be translated into machine code for the computer using tools such as assemblers, compilers and interpreters.
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