High-Level Languages

Nowadays, very few programmers deal directly with the individual instructions that a CPU processes. Instead, they code procedural statements in a special notation that a piece of software converts to machine instructions. This is much easier than coding the machine instructions directly. Over the years, computer scientists and developers have invented quite a few of these notations, each of which is a programming language. Programming languages and human languages are alike in that both have nouns, verbs, statements, punctuation, and rules governing what’s correct and what’s invalid. C, C++, COBOL, C#, Forth, FORTRAN, Java, JavaScript, Pascal, Perl, Python, and Visual Basic are all programming languages.

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