Programming Language

Programming Language?

In the beginning of time, people used gestures to tell, express things in simple word to communicate. And by time they were getting hard time to communicate efficiently and properly that they developed language (first spoken and then written). So, what is language? It is a systematic way which used to communicate. And after different stages different languages came in existence that now we can laugh together on jokes, puns and express our ideas and views. Thanks to language that now we can tell others what we need and likewise so many things. Well, computers live and think in vessels too… so we need a way to tell them what we want, so we can work together and get stuff done. Programming language is how we can talk to computers. It's a lot like English but it's kind of quirky too. Unlike people, machines cannot guess our intent. We have to be super meticulous and describe what we want in every little detail. This is how are we going to tell computers what we need or what we want? Of course, they do not understand English or any other human language.

Computers don't actually use words or meanings the way humans do. The computers are made up of many tiny switches (billions and billions of transistors) that are either ‘on’ or ‘off’. The ‘on’ state is known as 1 and the ‘off’ stage is known as 0. When you put those 1’s and 0’s together, you get options. If you put lots of them together, you get lots of options. Each chunk of options can now be something meaningful such as a number, a letter, or even a picture made of tiny dots. Now we have a way to tell a machine to do stuff using these simple bits of information (strings of 1’s and 0’s). But this way of telling computer what to do is too tedious and boring. So, we stack human-like languages that converts a simpler human-like language structure to the combination of 1’s and 0’s. This gives us many ways to give instructions to the computer. And as there are various ideas of people, programming languages are of many types. And of all the languages, they are broadly classified into three types.

1.     Machine level language

2.     Assembly level language

3.     High level language

So, Machine language is the one that is understood by a computer and that consists of 1’s and 0’s. Programming in machine language is a tedious task and they differ from one computer to another.

Assembly language is much simpler than machine language program. It uses much easier numbers, abbreviations to describe the collection of 1s and 0s. Thus, it is easier to implement and memorize. It is also known as a low level language because of the fact that to design a program programmer requires detailed knowledge of hardware specification. This language uses mnemonics code (symbolic operation code like ‘ADD’ for addition) in place of 0s and 1s. The program is converted into machine code by assembler. The resulting program is referred to as an object code. Even though it makes the programming easier it still is not used widely because of lack of flexibility and portability.

Thus to clear off the demerits of the assembly and machine level ( low level languages) high level language were introduced. The instructions of this language closely resemble to human language or English-like words thus making it easier to understand and memorize. It uses mathematical notations to perform the task. The high level language is easier to learn and requires less time to write and is easier to maintain the errors. The high level language is converted into machine language by one of the two different languages translator programs; interpreter or compiler. The major advantage of this language is that they are not dependent upon the architecture of the system we are using and program developed in one system can be run in another system with different specifications without any error. Thus high level languages are gaining much more popularity than other. There are many high level programming languages developed till this date according to the need of the people. Some of them are C, C++ and Java and so on.

C programming language is basic high level language and easier to learn and once you get to learn C you can easily learn and understand other high level programming languages. Thus we will be focusing on C. Thank you.

(Note: Programming languages are classified into two types in some books; Low level language and High level language and Low level language is further classified into two types; Machine language and Assembly language)