Types Of Computers Languages Explanation
By the end of this Article you’ll have an awareness at the development of types of programming languages and their classification into low and high level. You’ll also know that low-level languages are considered to be machine code and assembly language to fully start with look what we mean by the word programming paradeen now the word powerdine means to describe an example or pattern in our computing context. We mean it as a way to describe an example of a way of doing things so software as we know is written using programming languages and as programmers you’ve come to expect programming languages to have facilities such as variables loops conditions arrays etc and this is whether you’re being programming in Python Visual Basic or another procedural language the syntax or commands are slightly different but the underlying concepts haven’t changed that much and this is our programming paradigm it’s a way of doing things Python and Visual Basic are similar because they come from the same family of languages but there are other ways of doing things. There are other programming paradigms now at a very top abstract level we can sort all programming languages into two broad categories they are low-level languages and high-level languages and it’s a high-level language which you have been using to learn to program so how do computer languages evolve well when computers were first invented the only way to program them was to work in the actual binary numbers that represented different instructions those instructions as well as the addresses in memory where data was being stored also had to be referred to as numbers the actual programmer would have to program the exact sequence of ones and zeros directly into the computer this sequence of ones and zeros is machine language and it accesses the hardware directly to execute the instructions the program’s provided a consequence of this of course was in the early days there were very very few people who are able to program remembering the exact sequence of ones and zeros to come out even incredibly simple tasks serve a complex process and the tiniest of errors was called the program not to work in the late 1940s.
A language was developed which simply took each of the binary numbers that stood for instructions and addresses and allowed them to be written instead as groups of letters now this is the birth of the assembly language there’s a direct one-to-one relationship between assembly language and machine code in other words you supply a single line of assembly code and it is directly looked up and returns one line of executable machine language obviously a consequence of moving from machine language to assembly language is that now programming was a lot more accessible remembering the command add num1 as opposed to the string of binary ones and zeros for the machine made the language a lot more accessible. Now the languages we’ve been looking at so far are referred to as low-level languages and that’s because assembly language and especially machine language are incredibly close to the actual hardware the first language that could go further than this were developed in the early 1950s. The first of those been called Fortran these languages differed from assembler as each instruction could give rise to many lines of machine code so now we had a one-to-many relationship these much more complex languages are called high-level languages. The early high-level languages for a basic Fortran C and Pascal later on later on came more object orientated Langer the birth of Java and visual language like Visual Basic these will be some of the ones that you’ve been learning to program most likely and these are all called high-level languages
