C7 PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES

Other related material can be found in Section A4 Systems design and life cycle and Section B12 Systems software.

Programming languages are the means of generating the software that makes the computer work. A computer operates by executing a program, that is, following a sequence of instructions. This is held in memory as electronic patterns, known as machine code. The programmer starts with a design of what the program or algorithm is intended to do, then writes it in a programming language. The written program is known as the source code and is translated into object code (or machine code).

Programming languages are not the same as human languages – most obviously because (at present) they are only written and never ...

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