SS1 Second Term Computer Studies Lesson Note – Programming Language

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WEEK 6.                                                                               

TOPIC: PROGRAMMING LANGUAGE

CONTENT:    

1. Definition of programming language
2. Levels of programming language: Machine Language (ML), Low Level Language (LLL) & High-Level Language (HLL).

Sub-Topic 1: DEFINITION OF PROGRAMMING LANGUAGE

A program is a set of instructions that tells the computer what to do. Sometimes the instruction it has to perform depends on what happened when it performed a previous instruction.

A Programming Language is an artificial language designed to communicate instructions to a machine, particularly to a computer. Programming languages can be used to create programs that control the behaviour of a machine and/or to express algorithm precisely.

LEVELS OF PROGRAMMING LANGUAGE

There are three major levels of programming language:

1. Machine Language (ML),
2. Low Level Language (LLL) &
3. High Level Language (HLL).

Machine Language (ML)

The first generation of programming language, or 1GL, is machine code. It is the only language a microprocessor can process directly without a previous transformation.

Machine code or machine language is a set of instructions executed directly by  a computer’s central processing unit (CPU). Each instruction performs a very specific task, such as a load, a jump, or an ALU operation on a unit of data in a CPU register or memory. Every program directly executed by a CPU is made up of a series of such instructions.

Numerical machine code (i.e. not assembly code) may be regarded as the lowest-level representation of a compiled and/or assembled computer program or as a primitive and hardware-dependent programming language. While it is possible to write programs directly in numerical machine code, it is tedious and error prone to manage individual bits and calculate numerical addresses and constants manually. It is therefore rarely done today, except for situations that require rather extreme optimization or debugging.

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