Programming Languages - High Level Languages

 ·        A general trend in computing over the past 4 decades is to elevate programming from low level to higher level languages

·        I.e., high level languages are geared more toward people writing the programs rather than the computer

·        Assembly language instructions map directly to machine instructions

·        High level language instructions must be translated/compiled into machine instructions

·        High level languages are more “problem-oriented” than assembly/machine languages

·        E.g, they require little or no knowledge of the underlying computer architecture

·        Learning how to write/debug programs in high level languages is much easier and less error-prone than learning how to write/debug equivalent programs in assembler

·        E.g., high level languages required fewer statements to do the same thing as assembler

·        Programs written in high level languages can be ported much more easily to different computer architectures

·        E.g., the compiler encapsulates the machine-dependent details of the target assembly language

·        A special program called a compiler is needed to translate a program written in a high level language into assembly code (which is then transformed into native machine code by an assembler)

·        The statement written in the high level language are called source code

·        The compiler/assembler's output is called object code