Programming Languages - Low Level Languages

·        Computers only do what they are told to do

·        Except in Hollywood movies, e.g., 2001, Terminator 2, the Matrix, etc. ;-)

·        In order for a computer to perform a task, it must be given a series of specific instructions in a language it can understand

·        The fundamental language of any computer is its machine language

·        This is typically sequences of zeroes and ones

·        In the very early days of computers, this was the only way one could write programs!!!

·        To relieve the suffering of these early programmers, a higher level language called assembly language was developed

·        Assembly language contains mnemonic words and symbols for the binary machine instructions

·        An assembler maps assembly language instructions into machine language instructions

·        Assembly language programming is indeed a significant improvement over machine language programming

·        However, it has the following drawbacks:

·        Machine dependent - each computer architecture has its own unique assembly language

·        Low level instructions - writing programs is very time consuming, tedious, and error-prone